Brunt 1993 Aristotle and Slavery

342 Plato's Academy and Politics
the programme that Plato is said to have urged on him. I would add
that in west Sicily among the places that Titnoleon repeopled (Plut.
Tim. 35) were Acragas and Gela, and Plutarch says that they had not
recovered since their by the Carthaginians at the end of
the fifth century. Though they had been won back from Carthage by
Dionysius I, and rallied to Dion in 357 (Plut. Dion 26), they must have
suffered in the periodic wars between Dionysius I and Carthage, and
there seems to be no evidence at all that they were flourishing in 367.
Himera had never been restored as a Greek city, and in 357 Heraclea
Minoa was a little town with a Carthaginian garrison (ibid. 25).
Further west Selinus must have been in Carthaginian hands, in
accordance with the peace of 383, when all the land of Acragas west of
the Halycus had also been <;eded (Diod. xv. 17.5); Dionysius had
regained it in 368 (xv. 73.2), but it had presumably been lost again
and perhaps soon after, his death; even Timoleon had to leave it
under Carthaginian supremacy (xvi. 82.3), and so it remained along
with Heraclea and Himera in 314 (xix. 71.7). Thus the resettlement
(and in some cases the liberation) of Gel a etc. was a project that Dion
could well have entertained, and there is no need to posit any retro-
jection of Timoleon's work.
i
r
I
1
11
, Aristotle and Slavery
GENERAL REMARKS
Among the Greeks and Romans and all peoples known to them
slavery was ubiquitous.
1
In many communities slaves were doubtless
employed only or chiefly as household servants, but in those which
were economically most advanced, such as Athens, where Aristotle
passed much of his life, or Rome, they also worked in the fields and
the mines, and as craftsmen, traders, secretaries, accountants,
teachers, doctors and public servants; they shaped and decorated the
most admired vases of antiquity, and transcribed its literary master-
pieces. We cannot determine their numbers for any period or region,
nor the exact proportion of the labour force that they constituted.
Probably free workers always preponderated, peasants, craftsmen,
and labourers who worked for a daily wage; it was not profitable to
employ slaves who had to be maintained throughout the year in
seasonal or merely intermittent work, though a large household
establishment might be kept up for the splendour that it shed on the
owner. There can, however, be no doubt that in many parts of the
Greek and Roman worlds slaves made a large contribution to total
output, and that their availability permitted the citizens to devote
1 Unless otherwise indicated or clear in the context all references to Aristotle are to
the Politics, of which the edition by W. L. Newman, 4 vols. (1887-90), remains
importance. On ancient slavery the useful anthology of translated texts by T. Wlede-
mann, Greek and Roman Slavery (1981), has a good select bibliography; the
studies by M. 1. Finley which he cites, and G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle In
the Ancient Greek World (1981), chs. 3 and 7, are the best treatments (on serfdom I agree
with Ste Croix rather than with Finley, and I rate the importance of hired free labour
higher than either, d. ]RS (1980), 64ff.; (1982), 160f.). All explanations of the efflores-
cence and decay of chattel slavery in the ancient world are debatable. For its survival in
mediaeval Europe see C. Verlinden, L'Esclavage dans l'Europe mid., 2 vols. (1955,1977);
for late classical and mediaeval theorizing, A. J. and R. Carlyle, Hist. of Mediaeval Politi-
cal Thought in the_ West, 6 vols. (1905-36). For later discussions I am much indebted to
D. B. Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966). I have given no evidence for
certain propositions that J take to be established and agreed.
344
Aristotle and Slavery
more time and energy to the performance of civil and military duties
than they could have done if slaves had not been providing a great
part ofthe goods and services that the communities required. In such
places the stock of slaves was constantly replenished or augmented by
imports of foreigners; in an age where there was otherwise little
mobility of labour, this was the readiest means of increasing the
labour force to meet increased demand. The peopling of parts of
America with African slaves would later serve a similar purpose.
Apart from their importance to 'gross national production' slaves
were thought indispensable for satisfying the needs of all individuals
of even modest affluence.
2
At Athens it was a mark of penury if a man
could not afford to own a single slave.:3 For Aristotle as for Plato a
man's good or happiness consisted above all in virtuous activity, but
it was incomplete if he lacked the goods of body and estate. He
needed health and strength, and also property, not wealth, which
might actually be morally corrupting, but enough to secure his
independence, exempt him from the sordid tasks of providing for his
subsistence, and give him the leisure for performing his tasks as a
citizen in peace and war. Some social virtues like liberality could not
be practised at all without sufficient means (EN 1178a 28). The
contemplative life of the philosopher was indeed the best for the few
with the intellectual equipment to pursue it, and it required fewer
material resources, but the philosopher too needed to be free from
the incubus of procuring his own livelihood.
4
Aristotle was therefore convinced that if any men were to lead a
2 A. treats as an institut.ion of the and remarks (1278a 12) that
for mdlVlduals, free artIsans and hIred labourers for the community (ignor-
mg owned slaves, whose use was of no great importance). Even if individuals
often hIred labourers, they did so on a daily basis; unlike modern factory or office
workers, such labourers did not depend on a single person or firm for regular employ-
ment, as slaves on their masters.
3 Ste Croix, CR (1957),55-7.
4 Plato recognizes goods of soul, body and estate in that descending order (Laws
697 B, 743 E), cf. Aristotle vii. 1. 'The best life for each individual and for cities col-
is one of virtue with sufficient means to take part in virtuous acti-
VIties (1323b 40-1324a 1); hfe and the good life are impossible without 'the
necessaries', 1253b 24, EN 1101a 14-16, 1153b 16-18, cf. also 1177a 28-33, 1178a 23-
30, 1178b 4 and 33-1 179a 16; he makes it plain that modest means are best, cf. 1256b
31-3, 1257b 38ff., as against the accumulation of wealth which tends to divert men
from the of virtue: this is one of the considerations that makes him prefer
among pohtical systems those which vest power in the middle class (129,Sb 3-33), see
also fro 86 Ross. !n his model city the citizens must not be occupied in trade, indus-
try or. even farmmg, whIch would deny them leisure (1328b 39-1329a 3): they will have
suffiCIent resources from rents on landed property (1329a 18-20 with b 36ff.).
r
Aristotle and Slavery 345
good life they must be able at will to call on the labour of others. Now
it seems to be a historic truth that except among some peoples in
quite recent times the total production of material goods has been so
low that unless they had been unequally distributed no one would
have enjoyed a civilized life; the majority might be reduced to the
level at best of bare subsistence. This harsh need for exploitation of
the masses does not of course imply that they had to be slaves, but in
Aristotle's day and for long afterwards slavery was the most marked,
though not the only, form that exploitation took, and that on which
individuals of Aristotle's own class patently depended. In essence
Aristotle's defence of slavery is a defence of the exploitation of other
men's labour; the circumstances in which he lived and wrote deter-
mined that it should be a defence of slavery.
Slavery had the authority of immemorial custom. But it was one of
the remarkable achievements of the Greeks to challenge custom by
submitting it to rational criticism. Some had in Aristotle's time
argued that slavery was contrary to nature because it was contrary to
justice. It was these arguments that stimulated Aristotle to justify the
institution in principle. He contended that it was natural and just
because some or most men were so framed by nature that they were
incapable of full human development; it was nature's plan that they
should serve as instruments to the good life of those who were
capable of leading it.
The attack on slavery that he thought it necessary to meet was
purely theoretical: no one proposed its actual abolition. But in
modern times, when proposals were made to limit or abolish slavery,
Aristotle's arguments in its support were to be deployed for practical
effect.
5
Not that its apologists relied on them alone: they could also
appeal to the authority of Scripture and of the Christian Fathers or to
what they regarded as scientific proof of the of white men
to black.
We may notice here Aquinas' adaptation of Aristotle's theory.
Aristotle believed that it was in the interest of natural slaves that they
should have masters. However, the benefit to the slaves was merely
coincidental: primarily and essentially slaves existed for the welfare of
the masters. Aquinas held that experience showed that it was for the
good of slaves to be ruled by persons wiser than themselves and for
the masters to have their assistance: the interests of both are set on a
5 See L. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (1959); Davis (n. 1) esp. 173, 175,
247
par. Aquinas also qualified Aristotle's thesis that some men were
made slaves by nature. He thought that there could have been no
slavery in the age of innocence before the Fall; it was only thereafter
that it became natural in a revision of God's first plan, because it was
rational for sinful men. That was why it was authorized by the 'law of
nations', i.e. 'the law common to all men ... which natural reason
has established among all', to use the formulation of Roman jurists.
These jurists had indeed also written of a natural law under which all
men and animals are free, but in my judgement they were not then
thinking of what was just by nature as were the Greek thinkers whose
critique of slavery Aristotle controverted, but of the instinct for
freedom implanted by nature not only in men but in other animals
too: the 'law of nations' by which slavery had been introduced was in
their view the command of reason. Aquinas was similarly appealing
to the common consent of rational men. He was not the last to use
this defence of slavery. Grotius, for instance, was to contend that an
institution sanctioned by the general custom of nations (though in his
time it had disappeared from most parts of Europe) must bejust and
reasonable.
6
Aristotle did not rest his case on prescription in this way. But he
has a deep respect for commonly held opinions, which he thought
always likely to contain some truth (cf. EN i. 8), and it would perhaps
have been almost impossible for him to reject an institution approved
by all peoples of whom he had knowledge.
In modern times abolitionists denied the utility as well as the
justice of slavery. They held that free labour is more productive than
slave labour. The proposition'that reliance on slaves retards the
growth of the economy came to be seen as an established truth, and
was used by historians to explain why the economies of ancient
Greece and Rome ceased to progress, although the efflorescence of
slavery coincided with their greatest prosperity, and the slave
population was probably diminishing when the Roman empire was
also in decline. Further research has now cast the gravest doubt on
the supposed inefficiency of slave labour in the modern period. In
any case no one in antiquity ever questioned that, except in certain
6 Aquinas: Carlyle (n. 1) v. IH ff. (the view ascribed to him in the text is a
of statements that may seem discrepant). Grotius: Davis (n. 1) 115. For interpretatIOn
of the legal texts d. Justinian, Inst. i. 2 (whence the quotation), see my Fall of
Roman Rep. (1988) 290; for that of mediaeval civil and canonist lawyers see Carlyle n.
33-40, 117 ff.; the latter also invoked the sin of Adam, like Augustine and many other
Fathers. Cf. p. 222.
347
conditions,7 it was profitable to owners, and Aristotle had no need to
meet utilitarian objections to its use (cf. n. 11).
SLAVERY AS AN INSTITUTION
II
To understand and evaluate his defence of slavery in principle, we
must know what it was in practice. A brief description of the institu-
tion will be apposite.
Aristotle calls the slave a 'living chattel' (I253b 33, cf. Plato, Laws
777 B). Under Greek or other laws that sanction slavery,8 the slave can
be bought, sold, hired, pledged, bequeathed like any other asset. For
any damage the slave inflicts on a third party or sustains from the
owner can be sued or sue. Like other animals slaves may be gIven or
denied the opportunity to breed. Owners may have full discretion to
punish them even with death. If the laws afford the slave any
tion against ill-treatment (protection which may be nommal m
practice), that is analogous to the restraints that laws may impose on
cruelty to animals.
Yet the slave is also a human being (who may revolt or run
away), and the laws of slave societies recognize this, at least in so
as the interests of their free members require it. As the slave IS
articulate, his evidence may be useful to the courts. He may offend
against the community, which will treat his offences as crimes. He
may render public services, for which it will liberate him. Under
Athenian law (and much more under Roman) he may perform
various legal transactions for his master's account.
9
Rewards are
necessary to get the best service from slaves in responsible positions
or doing skilled work. They may be pecuniary; the may
acquire funds which strictly belong to his master, but whIch are
7 At least in Roman times it was seen to be uneconomic to employ slaves in occupa-
tions where they could not be continuously productive, since the costs of maintenance
were continuous, or in unhealthy places, where high mortality aggravated unduly the
cost of depreciation, though when slaves were particularly abundant and cheap, they
could be worked to death, as in some Roman mines (d. Brunt, ]RS (1?81), 93f.).
8 Far more is known of Roman law on slaery, exhaustively exammed by W. W.
Buckland, Roman Law of Slavery (1908), than of Greek; for Athens see A. R. W.
Harrison, Law of Athens (1968), ch. 6.
9 Harrison 174-6; Buckland, esp. chs 7-9.
treated as his own.10 The greatest reward is manumission.
ll
The
Roman freedman became a citizen, albeit with disabilities (which did
not descend to his offspring born in freedom); the Greek freedman
was registered as a resident alien. In either case the 'living chattel'
was always potentially a free man.
Probably most slaves could not expect manumission,12 still less the
affluence that some secured from pecuniary rewards, but in general
they were not necessarily at the lowest level of material well-being.
They were normally assured of subsistence, as free peasants, crafts-
men or day labourers were not, especially in an age when there was
no systematic poor relief from state or church; except when replace-
ment costs were unusually low (n.7), the owners had a rational
motive to keep them fit for a lifetime of productivity. Epictetus, a
freedman himself, remarked that slaves who passionately desired
freedom could find themselves much worse off after manumission (iv.
1.33-9). Hence among some peoples in antiquity men would sell
their children or their own persons into slavery: it might be the only
alternative to starvation.
13
Apologists for American slavery were to
argue that their slaves were always fed, clothed and housed, whereas
free workers might be destitute in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly
love; one writer suggested that if the Irish peasants in the 1840S had
been slaves, they would not have been left to die of famine. Freedom
itself may be an empty name for the employees of capitalists on
whose economic power the law sets no restraints.
10 There is no Greek word for Latin peculium, but for Greek practice see Westerman,
Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (1955), 16. Peculium could accrue from wages
or earnings of slaves in independent business (the Greek chOris oikountes, ibid. 12) or
gifts; when men sold themselves into slavery (cf. n. 13) and retained some or all of the
purchase price (Buckland 427 ff.), it constituted peculium. Slaves could use it to buy their
manumission, but this might also result from free gift or bequest.
11 In the United States the southern states increasingly sought to restrict manumis-
sion; there were no ancient precedents, except at Rome for criminous slaves. The far
greater functional importance of manumission in the Greek and Roman systems than
in modern systems of slavery resulted from the more varied and extensive use of slaves
in skilled and responsible tasks, and would in itself invalidate in some degree the appli-
cation to the former of any conclusions drawn from modern evidence as to the
efficiency of slave labour.
12 Pliny (NH xiii. 36) calls the slave gangs on Italian latifundia men without hope;
literary and epigraphic evidence shows that even the bailiffs (vilici) were seldom freed.
The same is obviously true of slave mineworkers. I know of no comparable Greek
evidence. But the frequency of manumission is itself attested for the Roman period and
has given some scholars the impression that most slaves could expect it. This must be
false, wherever most of them worked on the land (or in mines).
13 See esp. L. Mitteis, Reichsrecht u. Volksrecht (1891), 358-64. Cf. n. 10.
349
Chattel slavery is not the only form of legal servitude.
14
Contracts
may bind debtors to work for their creditors on terms devised to deny
them the chance of repayment; in the third world this kind of
bondage has survived to our own day. The law may also compel a
man and his children after him to work on a particular estate (or
sometimes in a particular trade) under the arbitrary jurisdiction of
the landowner (or employer). Such serfdom became the lot of large
numbers of peasants in the late Roman empire and in some countries
outlasted the middle ages. Debt bondsmen and serfs normally had
one clear advantage over chattel slaves: they were entitled to marry
and have legally recognized families, whereas the sexual unions of
slaves under Greek and Roman law had no legal protection; slave-
owners could always separate spouses, or parents from children, by
sale or gift. But debt bondsmen and serfs were less likely to rise in
status and prosperity than the most favoured slaves. It is significant
that servus, the Latin word for slave, was to be appropriated to serfs; 15
the modern word in all European languages is derived from Slav,
since in the middle ages the slave market was supplied by Slavs
captured and imported from the Black Sea.
There were debt bondsmen and serfs at times in some Greek cities.
The Spartan Helots, though designated as slaves (douloi), were serfs of
a kind; allotted to the estates of individual Spartan citizens, they did
not belong to the landowners but to the state. They may all have been
Greek; certainly those in Messenia were, and unlike chattel slaves,
who found it hard to organize revolts, they were prone to insurrec-
tion, since they never forgot their descent from the free Messenians
whom the Spartans had conquered about 700 Be, and they could
obtain support from Sparta's enemies (126ga 37-67); in Aristotle's
boyhood they at last recovered their independence. Aristotle adverts
more than once to the Helots and other such serfs,16 but he is
14 Cf. Ste Croix (n. 1) 147-70.
15 Mediaeval jurists in France and England assimilated serfs to the slaves of Roman
law, cf. Davis (n. 1) 33f., 39. No doubt this made it easier to legalize slavery in English
colonies; in other parts of America there was a direct continuity with Roman law.
16 Viz. the Helots, penestai of Thessaly, and the Cretan serfs (mnoitai, klarotai,
aphamiotai) whom A. confusingly calls perioikoi 1269a 37-b 12, cf. 1264a 35, 1272b 19); it
seems to follow that when he says that in his model state the land should be cultivated
preferably by slaves, but otherwise by 'barbarian perioikoi' (1329a 24-6, 1330a 25-31),
he means by the latter term serfs and not free subjects like the Spartan perioikoi. Since
he surely thinks that slaves will normally be barbarian too, why does he specify this
only in relation to serfs? Perhaps he had in mind the possibility that the model city
might be established in a non-Greek land in which the existing barbarian population
would be reduced to serfdom, like the Mariandyni of Heraclea Pontica. It seems
350 Aristotle and Slavery
generally concerned with the chattel slavery which was the normal
kind of Greek servitude, familiar to him from the cities in which he
lived. Most chattel slaves were probably of foreign extraction or
descent.
Slaves were either made or born. Men, women and children could
be enslaved legitimately under the rules of war both by Greek states
and by non-Greek peoples, and illegitimately by kidnapping and
piracy; they would be brought on to the local slave market by the
victorious generals of the state concerned, or more usually imported
by dealers.17 Breeding was doubtless also an important source of the
stock of slaves; the child of a slave woman belonged to her owner. But
the mother herself was probably in most cases a captive or descended
from captives. In a slave state a person born free under itsjurisdiction
is normally exempt from enslavement there, and can recover freedom
by legal process, if he or she can obtain access to the courts and
furnish proof of true status, conditions often hard to fulfil.
1s
But an
Athenian was a foreigner at Corinth, and a Corinthian at Athens, and
no foreigner had the right to restitution of freedom. III fortune could
thus reduce Greeks, and sometimes men of high degree, to slavery. In
wars the entire population of a city, or the survivors from massacre,
might be sold off by the victors. In 348 Philip II of Macedon so
treated the citizens of Olynthus, a city close to Aristotle's birthplace.
Yet despite the almost unceasing wars among their cities some
Greeks felt that they formed a kind of national community, within
which it was inappropriate for any Greek to be enslaved. Plato wished
to make it a law of war that Greeks should not enslave nor commit
other atrocities against each other (Rep. 469B-471B); it was only
barbarians that they should treat as they still treated their own
kinsmen (471 B, cf. Menex 242 D). Presumably then the slaves in his
probable that in his time serfdom had been extinguished in most of those Greek cities
known to him where it had once existed.
17 The evidence we have on the origins of barbarian slaves in Greece shows that few
of them can have been enslaved by the cities where they served; like the Africans
brought to America they had been enslaved by other means, often no doubt in wars
between barbarians. Even generals would commonly sell captives near the place where
they were taken, leaving distribution to dealers. Few dealers in antiquity reveal their
trade; as in America slave-trading was not very reputable.
18 In Greece and Rome exposure of newborn free infants was common, and the
foundlings would commonly be reared, if at all, as slaves; it must have been rare
outside romances that they could prove their birthright. In Roman times free men
transported far from their homes would also have had hard work to furnish evidence of
their true status.
35
1
model cities of the Republic and the Laws are all to be barbarians: in
the latter dialogue he recommends that they be of mixed stock and
diverse languages, to minimize the risk of their uniting in revolt
(777)19
THE GREEK CONTROVERSY ON SLAVERY
III
The objections to slavery to which Aristotle replies may have had
their origins partly in such repugnance to the enslavement of
Greeks. Alcidamas, a fourth-century rhetorician, who declared that
'God made all men free: nature has made none a slave', probably
had the Messenian Helots alone in mind; it was not unexampled
for a Greek to speak of 'all men' when he meant 'all Greeks' .20 But
the radical distinction between Greeks and barbarians had also
been challenged. A fragment of a fifth-century thinker, Antiphon,
runs: 'we respect and revere men of honourable lineage, but not
those of humble descent, yet this means that we are treating each
other in an uncivilized way, since by nature we have all been born
to be alike in all things, whether barbarians or Greeks. This is the
proof: all men find the same things to be necessary by nature, all
procure them in the same way, and in all such matters none is
distinguished as Greek or barbarian; we all breathe the air by the
mouth and nostrils, and use our hands to eat with.'21 Here the
fragment breaks off; we do not even know if Antiphon himself
accepted the argument he states or went on to rebut it (cf. p. 392),
but it remains significant that it could be propounded. The comic
poet, Philemon, a younger contemporary of Aristotle, makes some-
one say: 'though a man is a slave, his flesh is the same as ours; in
fact by nature no one is born to be a slave; only chance enslaved his
body.'22 Thus the question had come into popular currency. But it
19 Plato and slavery: E. R. Morrow, Plato's Law of Slavery, G. Vlastos ap. Finley,
Slavery in Classical Antiquity (1960), cf. Cl. Phil. (1968),291-5.
20 Quoted from his Messenian speech by a scholiast on Rhet. 1253a 20. When
Isocrates says that 'the rest of mankind' have been so far surpassed by the Athenians in
thought and speech that only those who share in Athenian culture can be properly
called Greeks (Paneg. 50), the context forbids the often made assumption that he
includes barbarians among 'the rest of mankind'.
21 Fr. 44 Diels-Kranz
u

22 Fr. 95 K (cf. 22); cf. Anaxandrides fro 4 K.
is only from Aristotle's Politics that we know anything of the debate it
engendered.
The debate concerned the justice of slavery, not any practical
proposal for its abolition. No one in antiquity thought of that. Even
the slaves who revolted or who ran away were not protesting against
the institution in itself, but simply seeking their own liberation. On a
few occasions political leaders tried to emancipate slaves in special
circumstances, or were accused of this by opponents for the purpose
of discrediting them; emancipation was a revolutionary monstrosity,
subversive of property rights.23 In the United States abolitionists were
met with this objection: an infringement of these rights would under-
mine the fabric of civilized order, and slavery, like other kinds of
inequality, was part of a rational structure whose dissolution would
lead to anarchy.24 The British government felt bound, when emanci-
pating slaves in the West Indies, to award handsome compensation
to the owners. But this sort of consideration was hardly relevant so
long as the controversy was confined to theoretical examination of the
justice of slavery; it would doubtless have emerged, if there had ever
been a substantial number of men who pronounced it unjust, and
began to agitate for its abolition.
Somewhat elliptically Aristotle gives us an account of the con-
troversy. Some held that there was no difference in nature between
free men and slaves; the distinction derived from nomos, law or
custom or convention, and it was unjust, since the nomos rested on
mere force (1253b 20-3). The nomos, whose moral validity they
impugned, does not appear to have been primarily the positive law of
any state under which an owner's title to slaves was secured, but
rather a supposed 'law of war' that legitimated enslavement; it was
apparently claimed by their opponents that there was 'a sort of
compact' between belligerents whereby all that was conquered in
war (including the persons of the vanquished) belonged to the victors
(1255a 5-7). It might seem that this covered the case only of men
enslaved in war, not those who were born and bred in slavery. But it
was doubtless argued, as later by Dio Chrysostom (xv. 25 f.), that the
very first slaves could not have been born slaves but must have been
war captives, and that therefore the servitude of their descendants
23 In extreme crises states occasionally gave or promised freedom to some slaves as a
reward for service in army or fleet, e.g. Athens in 406. As in all cases when a state liber-
ated slaves, the owners could doubtless expect compensation (e.g. Livy xxii. 57. 11 ).
24 Lewis Perry, RadicalAbolitionism (1973), 27 ff.
353
ultimately depended on the alleged compact. Hence if there were no
such compact, or if it had no binding effect, there was no justification
for holding anyone in slavery. The possession of slaves thus rested on
force, and force in itself, even if sanctioned by positive law, created no
moral rights or obligations. Just as the enactment of a state could (as
at Athens) be overturned as contrary to the constitution, so the
positive laws that sanctioned slavery could be invalidated by refer-
ence to a higher standard, that of nature (1255a 8-10); and those who
asserted its justice were perversely equating justice with 'the rule of
the stronger' (1255a 18). There is a hint that the critics of slavery
assumed that no authority was just unless it commanded the 'good-
will' (or consent) of those subject to it, and it was obvious that not all
slaves consented to their servitude (1255a 17).
Aristotle would reject the thesis that slavery was per se unnatural
and unjust: in his view, if there was a sufficient gulf between different
types of men, it was right that the superior should have dominion
over the inferior. This had already been urged by those who
grounded slavery in the right of the victor. On their view Aristotle
comments: 'in a way virtue (arete), when possessed of resources, is
best able to exercise force, and the stronger party always enjoys a
superiority in something good, so that it is thought that force cannot
be destitute of virtue' (1255a 13-16). One quality that the victors
might have and the vanquished might lack was courage; he remarks
elsewhere (1334a 21) that men unable to face danger bravely are
slaves of their assailants. But it was obvious that in war courage is
often of no avail: the heroism of the Spartans at Thermopylae had not
saved them from destruction by superior force. If the victors were
necessarily superior in something good, that good might be quite
other than virtue.
25
The tyrant too, who was by definition a bad man,
would be superior to his subjects in strength, but that did not make
his actions just (1281a 21-9); it was superiority in virtue alone that
conferred a title to political power (1282b 27-30). Even if the victors
excelled in courage, this in itself was not equivalent to excellence in
virtue; Aristotle followed Plato (Laws 625-30, 705D) in blaming the
Spartans for attending exclusively to the inculcation of military
valour, because it was useful for success in war (1271b 2-4, 1333b 5-
11), and not virtue in general. Thus he would not justify slavery by
the supposed rights of the victor, although those who were by virtue
entitled to possess slaves were also entitled to make war on and
25 Cf. Rhet. 1355b 4-7 and n. 4.
354
enslave peoples fitted to be slaves, if they would not voluntarily
submit, a mode of acquisition by hunting (1256b 23-7, cf. 1255b 38);
and military training was required for citizens of his model city, not
only for its own defence, but in order that they might enslave those
who deserved to be slaves (1334b 40-a 2).
As for good-will or consent on the part of slaves, he thought it a con-
comitant of the relationship between natural masters and natural
slaves (cf. 1255b 13-15), which was not based on coercion, no doubt
because in his view the possession of virtue by one man would evoke the
good-will of others (EN 1167a 18-20), and the natural master was pos-
sessed of superior virtue; but it was this superiority rather than the con-
sequential attitude of the slave that was the basis of his rights as master.
In its absence the slave was suffering a wrong, and enmity between him
and the master would be the inevitable result (cf. EE 1234b 24 f.).
Aristotle in effect points out that the inadequacy of the case made
for slavery by reference to the laws of war became evident when its
advocates allowed two exceptions: (1) ifthe persons enslaved did not
deserve to be slaves, as when they were persons of high birth, or
Greeks in general; and (2) ifthe cause of the victors was unjust (1255a
22-38). They thus recognized implicitly the truth of his own thesis
that slavery could be justified only when there was a radical distinc-
tion between slaves and masters in arete or human excellence, which
of course included justice (1255a 39 f.). He casually implies that this
meant that even if war captives deserved to be enslaved, it would not
necessarily follow that their descendants did; the claim that 'as men
beget men and beasts beget beasts, so good men beget good men'
was not invariably true; 'nature often wishes to produce this result,
but cannot succeed' (1255b 1-4).26 He did not explicitly draw the
inference that there was no moral authority in the positive laws which
made the children of a slave mother slaves.
The notion that slavery could be legitimated by the right of the
victor to enslave the conquered was not peculiar to the time of Aris-
totle: it recurs in later defences of the institution, and the difficulties
of relying on it to justify the enslavement of belligerents whose cause
was just, or the retention of their descendants in servitude, remained
troublesome. For example they invalidated the curious attempt of
Locke to justify slavery as it actually was in his world.
26 For other admissions that nature sometimes fails to achieve her purposes see
W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vi. 111-14; natural events are those which
occur either invariably or generally (Met. 1031b 31). Cf. p. 377.
355
According to Locke the freedom of men under government and
law from absolute, arbitrary power 'is so necessary to and closely
joined with a man's preserVation that he cannot part with it [sc. by
compact and consent] but by what forfeits his preservation and life
together'; as he may not morally take his own life, he cannot confer
on anyone else the right to take it. But ifhe engages in an unjust war,
he forfeits his own life, and 'he to whom he has forfeited it, may (when
he has him in his power) delay to take it, and make use of him and his
own services, and he does him no injury by it' (Second Treatise on Civil
Government, ii. 23). 'This is the perfect condition of slavery, which is
nothing else, but the state of war continued between a lawful
conqueror and a captive', though this state and the obedience due to
the conquerer both end, once a compact is made between the parties
(ibid. 24). It is in such conditions then that 'slaves, being captives
taken in ajust war, are by the right of nature subject to the absolute
dominion and arbitrary power of their masters'; they are no longer a
part of 'civil society, the chief end whereof is the preservation of
property' (85). But 'he that conquers in an unjust war, can thereby
have no title to the subjection and obedience ofthe conquered' (176),
and even 'the conqueror in a lawful war only has absolute power over
those who have forfeited their lives by guilt', and not then over their
estates, which should descend to the innocent children, who are of
course to be immune from enslavement (176-83, 189). Yet Locke
himself drafted a code for Carolina giving masters absolute power
over their slaves, without asking whether the Africans had been justly
enslaved, or considering the unquestionable innocence of their
children.
27
If Locke had had more respect for traditional Christian theology,
he need have had no qualms. Augustine had acknowledged that men
might be enslaved by unjust victors, but in his world there are no
innocent men: all alike are befouled by original sin, for which slavery
is one form of punishment.
28
27 Cf. Davis (n. 1) 118-21, who does not fully bring out the weakness of Locke's posi-
tion.
28 De civ. Dei xix. 15: 'nam et cum iustum geritur bellum, pro peccato e contrario
dimicatur; et omnis victoria, cum etiam malis provenit, divino iudicio victos humiliat
vel emendans peccata vel puniens'; after citing Daniel g: 3-15 in support of this, he
proceeds: 'prima ergo servitutis causa peccatum est, ut homo homini condicionis
vinculo subderetur; quod non fit nisi Deo iudicante, apud quem non est iniquitas et
novit divers as poenas meritis distribuere delinquentium'. And again 'poenalis servitus
ea lege ordinatur quae naturalem ordinem conservari iubet, perturbari vetat, quia si
contra earn legem non esset factum, nihil esset poenali servitute coercendum'; hence
Hobbes had found another way of justifying slavery by the rights of
the conqueror, which turned on the supposed consent of the
conquered to his lot. The 'dominion of the master over his servant ...
is acquired to the victor, when the vanquished, to avoid the present
stroke of death, convenanteth either in express words, or by other
sufficient signs ofthe will, that so long as his life, and the liberty of his
body is allowed him, the victor shall have the use thereof, at his
pleasure ... It is not therefore the victory that giveth the right of
dominion over the vanquished, but his own covenant.' If he is held in
bonds or prison, he is entitled to escape or resist, but otherwise he has
a duty of obedience, and cannot accuse the master of injury,
whatever punishments are inflicted on him. The master's rights
extend to his children and his childrens' children; Hobbes might
have argued that in each generation they make the same express or
implied 'covenant' (Leviathan, ch. 20). This is not the place to
consider whether Hobbes's general conceptions entitled him to
attach any morally binding effect to such a covenant. His theory is
not identical with that which Aristotle refers to, which derived slavery
from 'the right of the stronger', and might seem to leave slaves
morally free at any time to try the issue of strength anew, by resist-
ance and revolt. Aristotle's own theory does not: natural slaves ought
to be subject to natural masters, because it is for their own good that
they are slaves.
ARISTOTLE'S DEFENCE OF SLAVERY
IV
For Aristotle the earliest form of community or partnership is the
household, which originated from the union of male and female for
the continuance of the species (EN 1162a 16-24) but also from the
need for 'preservation', by which he surely means not so much self-
defence as provision of the necessities of life. In this context he
announces that the household comprises masters, those capable of
mental foresight, and slaves, those capable only of bodily work (1252a
26-39). He thus presupposes the conclusions of later argument that
there are two such categories of human beings, and ignores the
the apostolic commands of Eph. 6: 5; 1 Cor. 15: 24-8. Cf. Serm. 117.12. And see for
later statements of this view e.g. Carlyle (n. 1) ii. 117 ff. v. 21 ff.
357
probability that slavery could hardly have come into existence
without the coercive power of the state.
A village is formed by the aggregation of households and a polis by
the aggregation of villages (1252b 16 and 28). It is evident that at each
stage Aristotle conceives that there is an improvement in the material
standards oflife. Once the households are associated in a village, they
will exchange goods by barter, instead of living each from its own
resources (1257a 19ff.), and the village can provide more than bare
daily subsistence (1252b 16). The polis is 'more self-sufficient' than
the household and presumably than the village, though in varying
degrees (1261 b 12 ff.); in optimistic vein Aristotle can assert that it
attains virtually the limit of self-sufficiency for life and the good life
(1253 b 29-31). The city indeed exists for the sake of a perfect and self-
sufficient life (128ob 32 ff.), that is to say it provides the conditions in
which men can realize their full moral and intellectual potentialities
as social beings. The term 'self-sufficiency' perhaps refers to all such
conditions,29 but primarily denotes the indispensable material
resources (choregia, 1326a 6ff.), the category to which slaves (or serfs)
belong. However, households are the components of the polis, and
slavery is seen as an institution of the household; the acquisition and
use of slaves is part of the art or science of household management,
oikonomike, which is to be practised by the head of the household,
since slaves are among his possessions.
so
The householder needs tools for the mere purpose of life, and one
such tool of pre-eminent value, since he can use other tools, is a
servant of any kind; such a servant, if owned by the householder, is a
29 This is a statement of the ideal rather than the actual function of the polis . Few, if
any, Greek cities were entirely self-sufficient in material terms, and with their imperfect
or depraved political systems none assured the good life of virtue and wisdom
conceived by Aristotle.
30 Oikonomike is primarily concerned with the use of possessions (1256a Idf.), but
after long discussion A. concludes that it also embraces knowledge of the methods of
acquiring what is truly needed and marked out by nature as necessary for the good life
(1256b 28ff., d. 1257b Igf., 1258a 15-18); this is one form of chrematistike, though this
word more generally refers to the art of accumulating wealth, especially money, for its
own sake, which A. regards as perverse. (He admits that money is a convenience for
trade of the proper and necessary kind; he might have remarked that this was a
development only made possible by the polis which issued coins as legal tender, 1257a
3Iff.) Cf. i. 3 passim. He also writes for the most part as if economic activity was the
function of the householder alone, though he makes it the concern of the statesman as
well in 1258a Igf. and illustrates state interferences in the economy in 125ga 22-38. In
general ancient states adopted a practice of laissez-faire, apart from seeking to ensure
essential imports and of course imposing some taxes: political economy was not a con-
cept that could readily arise.
slave.
31
As we have seen, Aristotle supposed the most pnmitive
household to have comprised slaves. He was of course aware that the d
poor could not afford slaves; quoting Hesiod's line that a man must
have a house, a wife and an ox for ploughing, he remarks that the ox,
or the wife and children, take the place of a slave for the poor man
(1252b 10ff., 1323a 5 f.). He is therefore describing a household as it
should be, if it is to perform its function properly, just as he describes
the polis as it should be (n. 29). The poor who would lack slaves
would be peasant farmers, craftsmen or day labourers, classes whom
Aristotle excludes from the political society of his model polis,
because their occupations are in his view incompatible with the good
life; for that a man must have adequate resources. It is the perfect
household that includes slaves (1253b 4).
The free man he defines (Met. 982b 25) as one who exists for the
sake of himself and not of another. The slave is not merely the
possession of the master but 'a sort of part of the master, like some
living part of the body, though separated from it' (1255a 11 f.);
though we can speak both of the slave's master and the master's
slave, the genitive has not the same force in both expressions; the
master does not belong to the slave, whereas the slave wholly
belongs to the master, and like any other possession is a part of him
(1254a 9-13), though a separated part (1155b 11 f.), or like a part
(EN 1134b 10). This formulation is puzzling.
32
To say that X (e.g. a
tool) exists for the sake of Y, because it exists only for the benefit of
Y, is not the same as to say that X is part of Y. Aristotle also writes
of the citizen as a part of the city (1337a 27ff.), but the city is a
community of which each citizen is a member; and there is no clear
analogy between the symmetrical relations of the citizens to each
other and the asymmetrical relation of master and slave. The
analogy he draws in EE 1241 b 18 ff. between the relationships of
soul to body and of master to slave, again described as a sort of tool
and part of the master, is perhaps illuminating. The soul directs the
31 See Appendix for further discussion.
32 In all languages the genitive denotes a great variety of relationships; 'the master's
slave' and 'the slave's master' seem to correspond to 'the colonel's regiment' and 'the
regiment's colonel', where it is not meant in the former case that the regiment is
possessed by or is part of the colonel or in the latter that the colonel is simply part of,
still less that he is possessed by, the regiment, of which he is the commander. The link
intended between the two nouns connected is to be understood from their connotations
and sometimes from the context. 'John's book' may be a book he is writing or reading,
and the genitive then has neither possessive nor partitive sense, though in another
context it may be the book he owns.
359
body, and the slave must be directed by the master's intelligence, like
the master's own hands.
The householder is said to need servants, who can be regarded as
his instruments or tools. We should not be shocked by the implica-
tion that men may be treated as merely instrumental to the needs of
others; when we call in the doctor or plumber, we are not thinking of
their welfare but simply using them for our own purposes. But
Aristotle is making the further assumptions (a) that the householder
will have servants whose time is entirely at his disposal, and (b) that
they must be his property under his absolute control. The first
assumption was common to many past employers of domestic
servants, and the second was natural in the ancient world, when free
men were not found as servants iIi the household, except for some
freed slaves.
However, Aristotle is not asserting that the householder is entitled
to hold in bondage anyone whom the law has made his property.
Slavery is just only for those who are slaves by nature. The natural
slave is one who (a) is capable of belonging to another (that is why he
actually does belong to another), and (b) one who has only enough
share in reason to apprehend but not to possess it (1254b 22). The
second condition will be considered in due course; the first is liable to
misinterpretation. Taken by itself, it might suggest that the mere fact
that a man does belong to another shows that he is a natural slave.
But of course that cannot be the meaning. I take it that Aristotle is
simply pointing out that actual practice shows that a human being
can be property. But this is justifiable only if the second condition is
fulfilled. It is deficiency in reason that constitutes the natural slave.
v
In other places Aristotle seems to go much further in deprecating the
quality of the man who is a natural slave. He assimilates him to
animals (d. Met. 1075a 20f.), who if tamed are at an advantage over
wild animals, since they are ruled by men and owe security to their
masters (1234b 10ff.), just like natural slaves (1252a 32 ff.). Domestic
animals and slaves alike render bodily services to their masters
(1254b 25ff.), and Aristotle sometimes writes as if slaves do no more
(1252a 33, 1254b 17, 1258b 32ff.). The slave is as inferior to the
natural master as the body to the soul or the lower animals to men, at
any rate if he performs only bodily services (1254b 16 ff.). And the
enslavement of natural slaves is assimilated to the hunting of wild
animals; both are legitimate modes of obtaining subsistence or the
means of subsistence (1256b 22 ff.).
Since Aristotle thought that animals are designed for the use of
men (1256b 15ff.), it would have suited him well to make out that the
natural slave whose interest is subordinated to that of the master
(infra) is no better than an animal. But this cannot be his considered
opinion. The slave is a man, and a man differs from the animals in
having logos, the faculty of articulate speech, but also of forming
concepts including moral concepts (1253a 10ff.); the slave's share in
logos sets him apart from animals who are guided only by perceptions
(1254b 21 ff.). Observation showed Aristotle that actual slaves, many
or most of whom he undoubtedly took to be natural slaves, could
master a techne (art or craft), just as free men did (cf. 1277a 37-b 3);
but every techne involves the use of logos (EN vi. 4); slaves could thus
acquire some kinds of knowledge (1255b 24ff.). He does not suppose
that such knowledge would be imparted by the master, who must
know how to direct what slaves are to do, but not how to do it himself
(cf. 1260b 4, 1277a 33-b 8). The craft that he cites as an example is
cookery, but he recognizes that slaves may also practise relatively
honourable technai. Masters of sufficient wealth even delegate to a
steward (epitropos) the general direction of slaves, itself a matter of no
great moment or dignity,33 so that they may have undisturbed leisure
for politics or philosophy; in the Magna Moralia, if it be his, Aristotle
makes the steward entirely responsible for supervising the household
(11g8b 12 ff.). And there, as in the work of one of his followers (Oecon.
1344a 27), it is made clear that the steward would be a slave himself.
This was probably the custom,34 and in the Politics too Aristotle
doubtless meant that the steward would be a slave (1255b 31-40). So
slaves are capable of household management.
However, when admitting that slaves share in logos, Aristotle adds
that they apprehend but do not possess it (1254b 21 ff.). In the
Nicomachean Ethics he speaks of the appetitive or desiring element in
33 A. depreciates the knowledge required of the master (cf. 1325a 23-30), as part of
~ n argument with ~ h i c h I am not concerned, that Plato had been mistaken in suppos-
mg that the same kmd of knowledge was involved in ruling a household as in ruling a
state.
34 In Xenophon's Oecon. the steward (epitropos) is a carefully selected and trained
slave (xii. 3) and can deputize for the owner (xii. 4), cf. xii-xiv Jfassim for his functions,
but normally he is under the owner's supervision; Ischomachus and his wife are active
in personal management of their estate and house. In i. 3 f. Xenophon suggests that a
free man may become a salaried manager of someone else's property.
the soul, which may be obedient to reason and can therefore be said
to share in reason, as a son may be responsive to admonitions,
rebukes and exhortations from his father (ll02b 25-34) The same
idea seems to be present in a different formulation, when he refers to
the active life of the being 'who has reason', which has two modes of
operation, (i) obedience to reason, and (ii) possession of reason that
involves the exercise of thought; he proceeds to consider the proposi-
tion that 'man's function is an activity of soul which accords with
reason or is not without reason'; I take it that in the former case it
involves the exercise of thought and in the latter obedience to reason
(10g8a 3-
8
). What he says ofthe slave in the Politics should mean that
he is responsive to his master's reason. Hence Plato was wrong to
hold that masters should merely issue commands to slaves without
explanation (Laws 777 E, cf. 720Bff.); it is best to 'admonish' them
(1260b 6 ff.). In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle notes that free
children obtain a moral education from the precepts and example of
their fathers, which the tie of blood, the benefits they receive, and
natural affection dispose them to follow (ll80b 13-
1
5); he probably
thought that slaves, who also owe benefits to their masters and may
be bound to them in friendship (infra), could similarly profit from
instruction. Admittedly the coercive power of the state and its laws
are most efficacious in forming the character of free children (EN
1180a 18-21); the despotic authority of the master could be expected
to have a similar influence on slaves. Aristotle even suggests that
slaves are more receptive of 'admonition' than the master's own
children, in whom reason, though latent, is not yet developed (cf.
1260a 14). But it is not from the master that they are to acquire
knowledge of technai (supra), in which they evidently progress by their
own efforts or by being trained by other slaves; he is thinking of moral
instruction imparted by the master, as the context makes clear (1260c
34
f
f.),35 and it would seem that he supposes them to be more teach-
able than the free children, presumably because they have reached a
higher level of rationality, though unlike such children they have no
capacity for full development at a later stage.
Elsewhere Aristotle claims that natural slaves lack foresight (125
2a
32) and the power of deliberation (1260a 13). These too are claims
35 Oecon. i recommends the use of both rewards and punishments not only to get
good work out of slaves but to improve them (1344a 3S-b 7); this does not seem to apply
only to those whose character is to be trained for posts of trust (1344
a
27-9) Moral
instruction by precepts to slaves, Xen. Oecon. xiv. 4.
that he should have qualified. Deliberation in his sense is the search
by reasoning of the means towards a given end (e.g. EN vi. g), and
it is required in the practice of technai (EN iii. 3). It follows therefore
that slaves must be capable of deliberation to the extent required
for mastery of any techne. They must show some foresight even in
cooking a meal! In fact when Aristotle denies them foresight, it is in
a context where he says that only the master can provide for their
'preservation', and it is in asserting that the household needs a ruler
possessed of perfect virtue that he depreciates in various ways the
capacity of its other members, the wife and children as well as the
slaves, to rule themselves rationally. This suggests that it is the
power of deliberation of the kind that precedes moral choice (EN
1112a 15-17, 1113a 10) which a natural slave lacks. He cannot
direct his own life, and especially he cannot direct it for his true
good; he needs a master to do it for him. Hence a polis that
comprised only natural slaves and animals would be inconceivable,
since neither can live in accordance with moral choice (1280a 32-4).
The term rendered by moral choice, proairesis, is formally related by
Aristotle only to the choice of means to a given end, good or bad
(EN iii. 2; vi. 2), but many other texts show that more generally he
intended it to connote choice of the end as well.
36
We may then
conclude that the natural slave is taken to be incapable of discern-
ing both the end or ends for living and the means of attaining them.
In that case he should also be incapable of moral virtue as
described in the Nicomachean Ethics, for which proairesis, and there-
fore deliberation, is an essential condition (1l05a 29-33, cf. llo6a
3). Now Greeks often recognized that some slaves, however few,
behaved virtuously (see e.g. Plato, Laws 776n). And Aristotle does
not seek to explain this by assuming that it was true only of men
unjustly reduced to servitude and not of natural slaves, for he
admits that all persons in his model household must have some
virtue for the performance of their several roles (i. 5), not only the
wife and children of the master but the slaves too: they need a
modicum of courage and temperance for example, if they are not
to fail in their appointed tasks (1260a 34 ff.). Yet this raises a dif-
ficulty: if they can possess moral virtue, as might be expected of
human beings who have a share in reason, how do they differ from
free men (125gb 26-g)? If there is no difference, or only one of
36 W. D. Ross, Aristotle
5
(1949), 200 n.5, cf. W. F. R. Hardie, Aristotle's Ethical
Theory 2 (1980), 158, citing EE 1214b 7-1228a 1.
degree, Aristotle sees that his justification of slavery collapses (125gb
34-8).37
He supposes that any virtue that natural slaves may acquire is
imparted to them by the master; it is in this context that he refers to
the admonitions that masters should give them (1260b 3-8). But this
might be thought to accentuate the difficulty. He says that men
become virtuous by nature, habit and reason (1332a 39-b 8). Accord-
ing to the Nicomachean Ethics no moral virtues are implanted in 'us'
(presumably all men) by nature, which only makes us receptive of
them, and this propensity to virtue must be developed by habit (ii. 1).
He notes that it is universally believed that men have innate moral
characteristics, and concedes that even children and beasts have
natural dispositions to courage and the like, though these disposi-
tions are not true virtues in the absence of intelligence, and may
actually be harmful (EN 1144b I-g). He could not have denied to
slaves a natural disposition which he allows to beasts. But it is not
clear why under the influence of their masters their dispositions
should not be developed by habit into some of the moral virtues
which he describes in the Ethics, viz. those accessible to their station
in life (not e.g. liberality).
It may indeed be taken as certain that Aristotle's natural slave with
his deficiency in reason could never attain phronesis or practical
wisdom. Interpreters of Aristotle do not agree whether phronesis
includes knowledge of the true end for man as well as discernment of
the right course, conforming to the true end, to be taken in each
particular situation; I think it does.
38
Whether or not this be the case,
Aristotle could hold that 'it is not possible to be good in the strict
sense without practical wisdom or practically wise without moral
virtue' and that if a man has practical wisdom he will have all the
virtues (EN vi. 13). Virtue in this sense is beyond the reach of the
natural slave.
However, in his earlier discussion of the moral virtues acquired by
habit (EN books iii-iv), Aristotle has nothing of their inseparability
and suggests that a man can be morally good if he acts in conformity
37 In EN 11 77a 7-11 he says that the slave is incapable of happiness because incap-
able of virtuous activities. This is reconcilable with his view in the Politics only on the
basis that the virtue allowed them there is not true virtue, but something analogous.
38 Cf. Hardie (n. 36) 234ff. A.'s account is notoriously perplexing. But of the five
ways by which the soul can possess truth, an apparently exhaustive list (EN vi.. 3), it is
impossible to see by which A. has access to political and ethical truth unless It be by
phronesis.
with a rational standard and as the practically wise man acts (1l03b
32, 1l07a 1). It does not appear that he needs to know the rational
standard for himself: it is enough if he acts by it. Now the natural
slave, though clearly incapable of discerning the standard by his own
unaided reason, is capable of obeying the call of reason. Might he not
then follow the correct standard under the rational influence of his
master?
Not if the slave is allowed only a modicum of virtue required for the
performance of his tasks, and if truly virtuous action 'must proceed
from a firm and unchangeable character' (EN 1105a 32) and does not
admit of any excess or deficiency (1l07a 22). Aristotle is surely
expressing what people commonly think rather than his own opinion
when in another context he seems to allow that just and brave men
may be more or less just or brave (1173a 17-22); that is clearly so
when he says that minor deviations from virtue are not blamed
(110gb 18-20). No one could have a modicum of moral virtue as it is
presented in the Nicomachean Ethics.
But virtue was a term of varying connotations for Greeks, who
would certainly not all have readily adopted this presentation of it. It
would for instance naturally have been ascribed to men who acted in
given ways that were approved, though on Aristotle's view many such
actions could have been performed by those who were learning by
practice to be virtuous but whose character was not yet firm and
unchangeable. He lists five qualities to which the term courage was
often applied though each fell short of what he regarded as true
courage;39 they include the apparent courage induced by compulsion
and fear of rulers, or by shame at the possibility of disgrace (EN iii. 8).
The courage exhibited by slaves might conceivably fall into this
category. And he himself could use the term loosely in a popular
acceptation; in the Rhetoric (1366a 36ff.) it is 'a faculty, so it is
thought, of providing and safeguarding good things, and of confer-
ring many and great benefits'. Now, as Seneca was to contend (de
bene! iii. 18-28), slaves could and did render benefits to their masters
beyond those services which could be extracted from them by force;
this was a matter of experience, and Aristotle could not have been
unconscious of it. And in the Politics, precisely in discussing the
possible virtue of slaves, he says that it is misleading to give any
:\9 A. almost restricts true courage to fearlessness in pursuit of an honourable
objective, especially if there is peril of death, e.g. in battle (iii. 6); this was seldom in the
reach of slaves.
general description of virtue, e.g. a good state of the soul, or acting
rightly or the like; it is better to follow Gorgias and say that different
classes of persons have different types of virtue (1260a 24 ff.). Probably
he is referring to the view, apparently derived from Gorgias, which
Plato reports in Meno 71 E, that men, women and children all have
different virtues, and 'if you like, that is true also of free men and
slaves' . Aristotle proceeds that as the child who is not fully developed
(in reason) manifestly has no virtue of his own but only that which
can be referred to the fully developed person controlling him, so the
virtue of the slave has to be referred to the master (126oa 31-4, d. EE
124gb 7-9). This seems to mean not only that the master imbues him
with such virtue as he acquires but that the master furnishes the
standard for his conduct; his virtue is not autonomous.
It remains obscure to me whether this differentiates him sharply
from the free man who learns by practice to conform to a rational
standard without knowing for himself that it is the rational standard.
The citizens even in a well-ordered state, we are told, do not need
practical wisdom unless they are called on to rule it: it is enough if
they have correct opinions on moral matters (1277b 29-31). Ifwe ask
how these naturally free men form such opinions, or how they come
to be morally good by practice in acting as the good man acts, the
answer must surely be that it is because they have received the right
training from their fathers (126oa 32-5, EN 1180b 2-7), and prefer-
ably from the rules of conduct enforced by law (EN x. 9 passim); since
arguments prevail less with the young, except for a few with unusual
innate endowments, than fear of punishment for wrong-doing (11 7ga
33-118oa 5, d. llo4b 3-18), the rigour of the laws can be more effi-
cacious than paternal commands (118oa 18 f.). But it is not easy to see
how in principle the moral training that masters can give their slaves
differs from that which fathers can give to their ch_ildren (even though
in practice the head of the household may be more attentive to his
children than to his slaves), and the coercive power of the master over
slaves might seem to be as strong as that of the laws over citizens.
Moreover, in reality (as Aristotle laments) few cities, if any, had laws
which performed the moralizing function he desiderates (infra);
hence, what usually counted most was the influence of the head of
the household as much for his children as for his slaves. It is therefore
quite unclear that the virtue of the slave differs in kind from the moral
virtue of free men unaccompanied by practical wisdom. If slaves in
general were supposed to have less propensity for natural virtue, that
would seem to be a difference in degree and not in kind, and if they
could exhibit virtue only to an extent restricted to their ministerial
functions, it was equally true that the scope of the free man for
exhibiting his moral goodness would be limited by circumstances;
for instance in a city always at peace the brave man would have no
opportunity to risk his life in battle.
Thus in effect, but without realizing it, Aristotle has reduced to
vanishing point the difference in potential virtue between the natural
slave and the natural master, unless indeed the latter is assumed to
possess practical wisdom. And that is apparently the assumption that
Aristotle makes when he says that the master must have virtue in
perfection (1260a 14-18).40 This is a matter to which we must revert
later.
VI
Aristotle insists that while it is just to enslave men by force, if they are
designed by nature for servitude (1255b 37, 1256b 23-7), force,
though supported by positive law, does not in itself justify slavery;
natural slavery has to be just and beneficial to both parties. Now
justice always consists in a relationship between one man and other
men (EN 112gb 25-1130a 13), and in the various forms that Aristotle
distinguishes always involves giving each his due. The natural slave
needs to be ruled, and Aristotle seems to assert (1255b 5-9) that it is
his due to be ruled; that is why the master is acting justly towards
him. But in the Nicomachean Ethics he restricts 'political justice' to the
relations of men who are free, in some sense equal and governed by
40 MM 1200a 3 says that 'only when there is choice will there be perfect virtue, which
we said is accompanied by phronisis, though there must also be the natural impulse
towards the noble.' It seems to be identical with the sovereign (kyria) virtue of EN vi. 13,
which comes into existence when a naturally virtuous disposition is guided by nous, and
phronisis results. In Pol. 1260a 14 ff. A. says that 'the ruler of the household must have
virtue in perfection, as his task is without qualification that of the master-craftsman or
"director" (arehiteeton), but reason is the director'. Newman ad loe. cites parallels for the
use of arehiteeton, of which the most significant is EN 1152 b 1: the political philosopher
is arehitecton of the end by reference to which we call things good or bad. He might have
cited 1141 b 24-6, where it is said that phronisis concerned with the state may be 'legisla-
tive' or 'political'; the latter equips its possessor to deal with particular contingencies,
whereas legislative wisdom is 'architectonic'. The laws embody the principles by which
the state should be governed (cf. EN X. g). Here then A. is suggesting that the master
understands the principles, surely the moral principles, for the conduct of the house-
hold. That is why he needs perfect virtue involving phronisis, of which household
management is yet another branch (1l41b 31).
law, and says that it is only by analogy that we can speak of the justice
of the master of the household; strictly he cannot do injustice to his
own, his chattel or his child, since they are virtually parts of himself,
and a man cannot be unjust to himself (v. 6). Elsewhere Aristotle,
who treats justice and friendship of some sort as more or less indis-
soluble (EN viii. g), says that 'where there is nothing in common
between the ruler and the ruled, there can also be no friendship,
since there is no justice, for example in the relation of the craftsman
to his tool, the soul to the body, the master to the slave; though all are
benefited by the users, there is no friendship or justice towards lifeless
things, nor even towards a horse or ox, nor a slave qua slave. For there
is nothing in common [sc. between master and slave]: the slave is a
living tool, just as [any other] tool is an inanimate slave. No friend-
ship subsists with him qua slave; though it does subsist with him qua
man; there is thought to be some justice between every man and
every [other] man capable of sharing in law and compact, and so
there is friendship, in so far as the slave is a man' (1161a 33-b 8). In
the Eudemian Ethics he says that every partnership (koinonia) is
founded on justice, but there is no partnership between master and
slave, any more than between craftsman and tool, or soul and body,
since each of these pairs is really a unit; the inferior belongs to and is
a part of the superior (1241 b 12-24). He might have said on this last
premise that as justice always relates to another person or persons,
there can be no justice to one's slave, since he is not another person;
on the same basis there can be no friendship.
Aristotle is not consistent with himself. The household is a partner-
ship (1257a Ig), and though in this connection he can think primarily
of the relation between its head and his wife and children (EN 1162a
15-2g), he can also describe the slave as a partner in its life (1260a 14)
But the existence of any partnership entails s o m ~ kind of friendship
between the partners (EN viii. g). As for the slave being a part of the
master, on that very ground he also asserts identity of interest, and
friendship, between them (1255b 10-15). The denial that the master
can be just or unjust towards the slave viewed as a non-person seems
to be contradictory of the claim that enslavement can be just, unless
we suppose Aristotle to have held (what he certainly does not say)
that the natural slave, so long as he is legally free, is a person whom it
is just to enslave, but that once he is enslaved the concept of justice
becomes inapplicable to his relationship with the master!
It must be a matter of conjecture why Aristotle put forward these
incompatible views. It would probably be unwise to suppose that
they must represent his thinking at different times, since all thinkers
can unwittingly hold contradictory opinions at the same time. Aris-
totle's inclination to accommodate in a synthesis the most diverse of
widely held beliefs exposed him more than others to this danger. His
discussion of justice in general is pervaded by a tendency to equate
justice with conformity to the laws, if not as they are, then as they
should be,41 and this tendency doubtless reflects a common assump-
tion. Thus early in the Politics he treatsjustice as a product of the state
(1252a 38-40). Slavery could be seen as an institution of the house-
hold (n. 30), and like other property but unlike the free members of
the household (1260b 13-21), slaves were no part of the state (1328a
22 f.). Even when he aTIows that the master may have friendly
relations with the slave qua man, he does not let us assume that this is
to be explained simply by the slave's humanity, but adds that it is
because he is capable of sharing in law and compact. What he has in
mind here can only be surmised. Is he thinking that the slave is a
man who may be freed and will then share in legal (though not
political) rights, including the right to make contracts, or that the
laws may (as at Athens) seek to afford him some protection and
authorize him to enter into some legal transactions while still a slave?
The truth was that in some respects the laws always recognized that
the slave was a person, though for the most part they treated him as a
chattel. Perhaps it was because Aristotle attended principally to the
latter aspect of the slave's legal status that he could think that
'political justice' has no relevance to him, and only allows that
something analogous to political justice would subsist, no doubt
because he is after all a man, another person to whom the master
should be just in some sense.
Aristotle distinguishes three species of friendship (or quasi-friend-
ship), that which subsists between truly virtuous men and those
based on community of pleasure or interest. His conception of the
natural slave obviously excluded friendship of the first type between
master and slave, and though there is no clear reason why they
should not have shared in the same pleasures (and in the actual world
41 Cf. EN v. 1 passim; 1130b 8ff. (esp. 23f.: 'law bids us practise every virtue and
forbids every vice'); 1134a 26ff.: political justice subsists between men free and in some
sense equal; among others there is only an analogous relation; for 'there is justice for
men who are also related by law'; the universal scope oflaw, as he sees it, leads him to
assert that what the law does not command it forbids (1138a 7). A. was well aware that
actual codes oflaw did not correspond to this ideal (EN x. g).
3
6
9
this must sometimes have been a bond between masters and their
favourite domestics), in the Politics he associates the friendship that
mayor should arise with the claim that natural slavery is of advantage
to both parties, which he also makes elsewhere (1252a 36, 1278b 33-
8). Yet in the Nicomachean Ethics, in the context already considered,
he assimilates the rule of the master over his slaves to that of the
tyrant in a state (1l61a 30-5); so too in Persia the father exercises
tyrannic power over his sons, treating them as slaves (1160b 2g). But
the tyrant pursues only his own interest (1l60b 8). This presentation
of the nature of the master's power may have corresponded only too
well to what Aristotle could learn from observation. But it is at least a
misleading account of his natural master, just as it was only part of
what he saw as the truth that natural slavery was beneficial to slave as
well as master.
We may find his considered judgement in the Politics, where he
says that though natural slavery is beneficial to both parties, the
master rules primarily in his own interest, but incidentally in that of
the slave; by contrast he rules the free members of the household
primarily in their interest and incidentally in his own (1278b 31-a 3);
he will care for slaves more than for other property, but more still for
wife and children (125gb 18-22). The meaning of 'incidentally' (kata
symbebikos) is best illuminated by certain texts in the Nicomachean
Ethics.
42
An action like returning a deposit is truly just if the agent
acts 'voluntarily', with the intention of acting justly: otherwise,
though the effect is the same, it is only incidentally just (1l35a 15-18,
d. 1135b 1-6). Each species of friendship involves exchange of
services between the friends, but truly good men give each other
disinterested aid, and by comparison the benefits that other friends
afford to each other are only incidental to the pursuit by each of his
own advantage (1l56b g-ll, 1157b 1-5). So too then the master
intends the good of the slave only so far as it coincides with his own.
We need not think that here, as perhaps in the Nicomachean Ethics,
he was simply generalizing from the observed behaviour of masters.
He was describing slavery as it ought to be. He had justified slavery
on the basis that slaves were necessary to the master, if he was to lead
a good life, and that he was entitled to hold in slavery men who were
fitted by nature to be merely his servants. It was enough if masters
could satisfy these conditions. If Aristotle had been primarily
42 Usages of the phrase in his logical theory and discussions of cause and chance
(Guthrie Hist. of Greek Philosophy vi (1g81), 147 f. 233-41) seem irrelevant.
370
concerned with the need of natural slaves to have masters, he should
have maintained that all legally free men, who were slaves by nature,
should for their own good be reduced to slavery. It is clear that he
thought that free manual workers, engaged in degrading and servile
occupations for which very little virtue was needed (1258b 34-7),
were as a class no better than slaves; in his own model city he denies
them civic rights on the ground that they were not 'artificers of virtue'
(1339a 20). Of course in all Greek cities there were such free workers,
and in democracies they shared in political power; to propose their
enslavement would have been as wildly impractical as to propose the
abolition of slavery, and even in constructing a model city Aristotle
did not wish to construct a Platonic Utopia (cf. 1265a Ig). Yet his
theory gave him good reason (infra) to think that such free workers
would have been better off as slaves. In any case the superior man is
entitled to prefer his own interest to that of the inferior, if there is any
conflict between them. Thus the magistrate as the guardian of justice
should apportion to every man his due share, but this means that he
may give himself a larger share if he deserves it (EN 1134b 1-5). So
the master can legitimately pursue his own good (and that of his
family) rather than that of the slave; nature has fortunately arranged
that these objectives will normally coincide.
What benefits could the slave expect? One, as we have seen, was
the possibility of moral improvement. Aristotle seems to suggest that
for this they had more scope than free workers whom the master
might employ, presumably to supplement their labour. Such
employees are in his view in 'a limited servitude': servitude, no
doubt, because their tasks are degrading (supra), and because they
are in some measure economically dependent,43 but 'limited'
because they are not under the master's absolute authority. And they
get only 'as much virtue as servitude', less than slaves to the extent
that they are more remote from him, and so less well placed to learn
as much as slaves from his example and instructions (1260a 37-b 3).44
43 Cf. 1337b Ig-21, EN 1124b 31-1125a 2, Rhet. 1367a 2Rff.; Met. g82b 25. See Ste
Croix (n. 1) 182-5 who tries to show that A. esteemed craftsmen, even if they worked
with their hands, slightly more than hired labourers.
44 The passage is highly elliptical. The question whether free artisans (doing the
same kind of work as slaves) need virtue like slaves is raised parenthetically, and an
affirmative answer is given only indirectly. A. then adds that their case is different for
the reason given above. Finally he remarks tangentially that 'the slave belongs to the
things formed by nature, as no cobbler or any other craftsman does'. We have to bear in
mind that in his view the free artisan might be, perhaps commonly was, a man naturally
fitted to be a slave; however, the mere fact that he was practising a craft was no
37
1
This shows incidentally that Aristotle has in mind only slaves of the
household under the master's direct supervision. Even within the
household the master's influence would be less effective if he com-
mitted management to a steward. It would vanish for slaves working
on estates (including mines) of which he was the absentee owner,
relying on overseers. Similarly the friendship that might develop
between master and slave would depend on constant association.
45
One might revert to the passage in which Aristotle writes as if the
master could view the slave alternatively as a mere chattel or as a
man. Was it ever possible for a master to think of the same slave in
either of these one-sided ways? Even when considerations of profit
and humanity diverged, must he not inevitably have struck some
kind of balance between them? Be that as it may, it was obviously
easy for the master to treat as mere chattels distant slaves whom he
had never known, and as men those with whom he was in continual
contact. Whatever else may be thought of Aristotle's defence of
slavery, it is not a defence of the use by absentee owners oflarge gangs
of slaves in mines or plantations of the Roman or American kinds.
46
VII
Whatever natural slaves may gain from the master in morality, they
owe to him first and foremost their 'preservation' (1252a 31), like
domestic animals (1254b 13). Aristotle drily remarks that in his own
interest the master must look to that of the slave, since he ceases to be
a master if the slave is destroyed (1278b 36-8). The interest of masters
in preserving their property has always been the best guarantee of the
welfare of their slaves, assuring them of subsistence in conditions
when free workers are homeless or famished, and protecting them
against gross ill-usage better than laws often enacted for the purpose,
which have seldom if ever been fully enforced.
Later moralists, both pagan and Christian, would prescribe rules
for the guidance of actual masters, enjoining the good treatment of
proof of this; a naturally free man might occasionally learn a craft for his own purposes,
cf. 1277 a 32 ff., or under the compulsion of legal servitude, and his chance of becoming
virtuous would then be unrelated to his association with an employer.
45 In varying degrees every kind of friendship depends on closeness of association, d.
EN viii. 5.
46 The citizens of the model city need only relatively modest means (1323b 8ff.).
Oeeon. i contemplates estates with overseers (1345a 18ff.), but advises, as did the Roman
agronomists, constant inspections by the owner (1345a 7 ff.).
slaves on grounds of expediency or humanity or both; hardly any
excelled the author of the first book of the Oeconomica, an early
follower of AristotleY But Aristotle himself propounded no such
rules: he did not need to do so. The natural master, as a man of
perfect virtue, would know how to care for his slaves. We can guess
how he would act from Aristotle's account of the particular virtues
which practical wisdom would combine, even though Aristotle never
illustrates their application to slaves. As a temperate man, and one
not easily moved to anger (EN iii. S), the natural master would not
indulge lust or rage at their cost. He would be equi1:able, and there-
fore not insist on all his strict rights, and be disposed to forgive faults
(EN 1138a 1, 1143a 21). With a disposition to friendliness (iii. 6), he
would prefer to give pleasure rather than pain, adjusting this attitude
to different persons in accordance with their social stations and the
closeness of his relations with them (1126b 30-1127a S). Aristotle
thinks that men have an inborn sympathy or friendly feeling for other
men as such: 'that is why we praise those who love men' (l1ssa 16-
21).48 This gives a reason for the origin of friendship between master
and slave other than that which Aristotle explicitly supplies (supra).
For the purpose of making actual slavery efficient, the author of the
Oeconomica says that it is just and expedient to offer all slaves the
prospect offreedom after a specified number of years (1344b IS ff.). In
fact the practice of manumission was indispensable if the best work
was to be obtained at least from skilled slaves in Greece (or Rome).
Yet Aristotle adverts to manumission only once, and curiously
enough when referring to the slaves or serfs who are cultivating the
soil in his model city: he promises to show that they should all be
allowed the hope of freedom, a promise not fulfilled in the Politics as
47 See Oeeon. i. 5. The slaves must not be subjected to hybris or cruelty. In return for
their work they must be given adequate food, which is a 'slave's pay' and keeps up their
strength, and clothing; punishments are of course allowed, but holidays and reward's,
ultimately manumission, are no less necessary. They must be permitted family life. Cf.
Panaetius (ap. Cie. de offie. i. 41): justice is required in treatment of slaves, 'quibus non
male praecipiunt, qui ita iubent uti, ut mercennariis; operam exigendam, iusta
praebenda' (e.g. food and clothes, cf. Sen. de benej. iii. 21). The precept went back at
least among Stoics to Chrysippus who described the slave as 'perpetuus mercennarius'
(ibid. 22, cf. SVF iii. 352). In practical effect this went no further than the recommenda-
tions in the Oeeonomiea, but it rested on a different basis, that any man as such has
rights. Some Stoics could construe rights in a narrow, legalistic fashion, see n. 53, but
Seneca (ep. 47. 11) and Hierocles (Stob. iv. 660f. Hense) counselled masters to treat
slaves as they would wish to be treated, if slaves.
48 Cf. J. de Romilly, La Doueeur dans La pensie greeque (1979), on the humanity evinced
by Aristotle (189ff.) and by Peripatetics, who perhaps influenced Menander (199 ff.).
373
we have it (1344b ISff.). Yet it would seem that his theory requires
that, whereas actual slaves who are not natural slaves should be set
free, as soon as their quality is discovered, natural slaves should never
be liberated, if regard were paid only to their own interest. (If they
were not conscious of this, and desired freedom as a reward, it might
then be in the interest of the master to meet their desire!) However, in
his will Aristotle ordered that a woman should be manumitted at
o n c e ~ four other slaves on the marriage of his daughter, and all his
other personal servants 'at the proper age', if his executors deemed
them worthy of freedom (Diogenes Laertius v. 14f.). Was he just
forgetting his own principles and conforming to convention, or had
he learned that education might bring even natural slaves to the point
at which they could direct their own lives and were thus entitled to
freedom? Recognition of this possibility would have still further
blurred the distinction between natural masters and natural slaves.
The possibility of slave resistance like that of manumission is only
noticed by Aristotle when he is thinking of slaves or serfs employed in
large numbers on the land. Only in these conditions did concerted
revolts occur in the ancient world. In Aristotle's experience they had
been confined to serf insurrections in Sparta and Thessaly, where the
insurgents could look for aid to neighbouring states (126ga 34ff.). In
controlling their serfs the Spartans and Thessalians, he suggests, had
not discovered the right mean between giving them undue licence
and repressing them too harshly (126gb 7-12). The only remedy that
he devises for such rural workers in his model city is to provide that
they should be recruited from different peoples
49
and that none
should be of a spirited character (1330a 36ff.), which he attributes to
northern barbarians (1327b 23-6). But it may be that he con-
templated manumission for them, precisely because he saw it as a
prophylactic against revolt.
The relationship of these slaves to their masters could not have
been of that ideal kind which we have detected in his conception of
household slavery. Where there was a bond of friendship based on
consciousness of common interest between master and slave, resist-
ance by slaves would be unthinkable. A natural harmony would have
subsisted, such as the Stoic Chrysippus perhaps imagined.
50
This
notion was to reappear in southern apologies for American slavery, in
49 So Plato, Laws 777.
50 He discussed household servants in his work On Concord (Athen. 667 C = SVF iii.
353, cf. n. 69).
which the African slaves could be regarded as natural slaves because
of their assumed racial inferiority. Thus the southern statesman John
C. Calhoun declared that 'every plantation is a little commonwealth,
with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united
interests of capital and labour, of which he is the common repre-
sentative'; each party was 'equally represented' and perfect harmony
achieved.51 More flamboyantly the sociologist George Fitzhugh, who
excoriated northern millowners for ruthlessly exploiting free workers,
held that 'some men are born with saddles on their backs and others
booted and spurred to ride them, and the riding does 'them good'. 52
Aristotle's belief that servitude is in the interest of natural slaves
encounters difficulties which he does not consider.
I. The interest of master and slave might generally coincide, but if
they conflicted the master would prefer his own. The Stoic Hecaton
in a casuistical discussion put some possible cases (Cic. de offic. iii.
89) Should the master let his slaves go hungry when the price of food
was high? If a ship had to be lightened, should the master throw
overboard an expensive horse or a cheap slave? Cicero says tartly that
at least in the first case he leaned to expediency rather than
humanity; in Hecaton's view a man was always entitled to pursue his
own material interests provided that he did not infringe the rights of
others defined in social customs, laws and institutions (ibid. 63), and
in the cases considered slaves would have no such rights that he
should respect.
53
Aristotle might have inclined towards humanity,
but as on his theory the natural master and his wife were actually,
and his children potentially, more valuable beings than natural
slaves, he should at least always have preferred what made for their
welfare to what made for the welfare of the slaves, if he could not
encompass both.
54
51 Quoted by J. R. Pole, Pursuit of Equality in American History (1978), 163.
52 Quoted by Ste Croix (n. 1) 487.
53 Chrysippus had said that as in a foot race the runner might properly do all he
could to win short of fouling his competitor, so every man could fairly seek to obtain
what he needed provided that he did not deprive another of his right (de offic. iii. 42).
The casuistical controversies between two successive Stoic scholarchs, Diogenes and
Antipater (ibid. 49-57,91 f.), show that one Stoic could hold, and another deny, that a
right was merely that defined by positive law; a man need have no scruple on the
former view in seeking his selfish interest to the maximum extent that the law
permitted. Hecaton seems to have been of this way of thinking (cf. ibid. 89), though in
some cases he introduces other considerations.
54 Hecaton thought that if two wise men were drowning, and only one could be
saved by holding on to a plank, one would yield to the other whose life was more
valuable for his own sake or his country's (de offic. iii. 90). The same principle would
A ris to tle and Slavery
375
2. A master was vested with absolute power over his slaves. Aris-
totle's natural master should have possessed the rationality that
would enable him to perceive that his interest was normally identical
with that of his slaves and to act accordingly. But Plato in his old age
had concluded that even the best of men would be all too readily
corrupted, ifhe were given absolute political power (Laws 875B), and
the danger of entrusting absolute power within the household to its
master was no less. Aristotle too notes how the judgement of any
individual may be distorted by anger or some other passion (1286a
33-5), and in the context he is not thinking only of bad men. Jeffer-
son, a slave-owner himself, was to say that an owner 'must be a
prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved'.55 And,
if only men of virtue, or perhaps of practical wisdom, were truly
qualified to be masters, how could they be identified? By some sort of
public examination? Naturally Aristotle never entertained such a
thought. If his theory was to be worked out in practice, he should
have laid down rules both for the liberation of men held in servitude
who were not natural slaves and for the transfer of natural slaves from
the ownership of masters who lacked virtue to that of those who
possessed it. 56
3. Aristotle certainly did not think that perfect virtue was unattain-
able; it was for instance exemplified in the true friendships of good
men, which he had experienced in his own philosophic circles. But
he casually remarks that it is rare (EN 1156b 25). It could hardly be
found in those who misconceived the true good for man, falsely
taking it to be a life of pleasure or an abundance of external goods
such as honour or wealth (EN i 4f., 8); many were insatiate in money-
getting (1257b 31-1258a 14), and they would of course be slave-
owners; and he expresses some surprise that Eudoxus, though he
advocated a kind of hedonism, was a man of outstanding virtue,
particularly in self-control (EN x. 2). Aristotle held that it was the
proper function of the laws to promote the moral education of the
citizens (1266b 29-31, d. EN 1l03b 2; x. 9), but Sparta was the only
or almost the only city which recognized this (EN 1180a 24-8), and
like Plato Aristotle criticized the Spartans for inculcating no virtue
doubtless apply as between those who were not sages. Aristotle would naturally have
regarded the lives of citizens or potential citizens as more valuable for themselves and
their cities than the lives of slaves.
55 Quoted by H. F. May, Enlightenment in America (1976), 301.
56 In Roman imperial law a slave subjected to outrages by his master could require
his sale to another owner (Dig. i. 6.2).
but military valour (1271 a 42 ff.). He seems to think it inevitable that
positive laws should vary with different types of constitution (128ga
13-15): they would not be the best absolutely but only the best for a
particular kind of political system (12g5a 8ff.). But of the systems
which he approves in varying degrees, monarchy, aristocracy,
moderate democracy, or a mixed system, it is not clear that he could
have cited any satisfactory instances of his own day; the 'mixed sys-
tems' of Sparta and Crete were in his view defective. Most con-
temporary cities were ruled by tyrants" oligarchies or extreme
democracies, degenerate systems in his view, since the rulers exercise
power in their own selfish interests. It was not their aim to make the
citizens good men: a man counted as a good citizen ifhe was loyal to
the regime (iii. 2, especially 1276b 28-36). Aristotle enquires if the
good citizen must be a good man in a well-ordered state, and con-
cludes (1277b 25ff.) that there the rulers must have practical wisdom,
but that the rest of the citizens need only have correct moral opinions.
But if few or no actual states are well ordered, this minimum require-
ment would seldom be realized, and even in the well-ordered state
the majority of the citizens might lack the perfect virtue predicated of
the natural master, if that is to be equated with practical wisdom.
It seems to follow from all this that in reality few men are capable of
leading the good life: their habits and false conceptions, induced by a
faulty education, make this impossible. Yet the right to own natural
slaves seems to be based on the premise that they are appurtenances
required for the good life. Though Aristotle clearly implies that it is
unjust to retain in servitude men who are not natural slaves, he never
confronts the difficulty that it would not be just for natural slaves to
be possessed by men who lacked the requisite qualifications. To have
implemented his theory would have entailed a vast change and
restriction in the actual institution of slavery. Newman claimed that
'he deserves to be remembered rather as the author of a suggestion
for the reformation of slavery than as the defender of an institution' (i.
151). But he never brings out what should have been the implications
of his theory, and I suspect that he was quite unconscious of them.
Forgetting that few masters were men of virtue, as he conceives
virtue, he was probably so impressed by the wide disparity that he
detected between the rational and moral qualities of most actual
masters and most actual slaves that he assumed that there was a
r o ~ g h correspondence between sIavery as it actually was and slavery
as It ought to be. In a rather similar way though the Greek cities as he
l
knew them did not fulfil all the functions that he attributed to the city
as it should be, he everywhere leaves the impression that they repre-
sented a form of social organization superior to any other; part at
least of his delineation of the true polis corresponds in his mind to that
of existing poleis.
VIII
The existence of natural slaves, he says, can be demonstrated from
theory and experience (1254a 20f.).
Theoretically he argued that from the moment that things come
to be they are marked out 'to rule or be ruled' (1254a 2). This is
true of every entity composed of parts (and the slave is a part of the
master), and in particular of all living things 'as an outcome of the
whole of nature', i.e. by a sort of natural law (a 28-33) This initial
premise, he says, belongs to a subject beyond his present scope (a
33f.); he merely illustrates it with some qualifications. He asserts at
the outset (a 22 f.) that the subordination characteristic of the
natural order is necessary and beneficial (sc. to both parties). Here
'necessary' seems to mean 'normal': exceptions occur, but these
must be regarded as deviations from the design of nature, which
does not always effect her purposes (cf. n. 26). The soul rules the
body, the rational element in the soul rules the emotional, and the
male rules the female, yet in bad men the body seems to dominate
the soul, and (so it is implied) the emotional element may dominate
the rational. But the intention of nature is to be seen in her
successes, not in degenerate specimens of her work. He later notices
that in some marriages the woman is the superior partner, but this
too is 'contrary to nature' (125gb 2 f.). His principle entitles men to
rule over beasts, and Aristotle's suggestion that tame animals are at
an advantage over wild animals conforms to his belief that natural
subordination is for the good of the subjects (1254b 11-13); the ox
about to be sacrificed, if it could think and speak, would hardly
have agreed that its human 'ruler' ensured its safety! It is in this
context that he says that there is little difference between the bodily
services that slaves and animals alike render, and that the slave,
though responsive to reason, does not 'possess it' . We have seen
that he cannot press his analogy between slaves and animals, and
that even his denial of the slave's full rationality is in effect qualified
later. Yet these are the considerations on which he seems to rely for
the claim that natural slaves exist and that it is to their own advantage
to be ruled by masters.
. It is not clear that this is a merely theoretical argument: in part it
seems to be an appeal to experience. Nothing has been said which
would tend to show that within the human species there must be two
subspecies as different from each other as men from beasts.57 It might
have been more plausible from Aristotle's teleological standpoint if
he had argued that as nature had made the use of slaves indispens-
able for the good life, which superior men could live, she must also
have formed other men suitable for the purpose, b ~ t he does not in
fact produce this argument, and it would be open to the objection
that here too nature might have failed to realize her design. He
himself remarks that she had failed in her intention to distinguish
free men by their bodies: some slaves have better bodies than some
free men, and the true distinction between them is to be found only
in the difference of their souls, which is harder to detect (1254b 28-
40). It goes without saying that neither he nor anyone else in
antiquity could think of the colour of the skin as a significant
criterion. Colour prejudice was unknown,58 and in fact black slaves
were rare, and nothern blondes common. In modern times, when the
natural inferiority of black Africans was alleged as a justification for
their enslavement, it had to be contended that their colour proved
them to be the progeny of Ham, consigned to servitude by divine
curse, or alternatively (in pre-Darwinian days) that other physical
characteristics showed that they were a different species closer to apes
than to other men.
59
We must all admit that men are of very varying degrees of intel-
ligence and that at the lowest level, that of mental defectives, they
must remain like children under tutelage. If there is a continuum of
intelligence, it may seem reasonable in principle to hold that the
superior should rule the inferior, though we may doubt if there is any
certain method of identifying the superior and if they can be trusted
not to abuse their power. On this basis Aristotle could defend the
right of the father to rule his children, of the husband to rule his wife
(!) and of the best man or men to exercise monarchic or aristocratic
government in a state. In all these cases he can treat the rule of the
57 Cf. O. Gigon, Entretiens Hardt xi. 256ff. Pol. 1332b 3ff. distinguishes all men as
such from the brutes by their possession of reason.
58 F. M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity (1983).
59 Davis (n. 1) 451-9.
1
superior party as beneficial to the inferior, because the ruler is intent
on the good of those he rules as much as on his own and is not using
them as mere instruments for his own exclusive benefit. But the
master is entitled to treat his natural slaves simply as tools, and it is
only coincidence if this turns out to be for their advantage, or rather if
it is normally for their advantage, that is simply because it is normally
in the master's interest to care for them as property and make them
efficient for his purposes. So Aristotle needed to establish that there
must be a class of human beings capable of no better lot. But there is
nothing in his hierarchical theory of the natural order that demands
that there must be a gradation among human beings corresponding
to that between soul and body or man and beasts.
I can hardly believe that Aristotle would himself have found his
theory convincing unless he had been persuaded by experience of the
existence of natural slaves. But though he says that this can be proved
by empirical evidence, he offers none. Probably he thought proof
superfluous: the facts were patent. It was a commonplace that slaves
were generally stupid, cowardly, mendacious, idle and so forth. A
free man could be stigmatized as servile (aneleutheros). Homer had
said that Zeus takes away half a man's excellence (arete) on the day
when he is enslaved (Odyssey xvii. 322 f.). This was plausible. We can
hardly overestimate the effect of the trauma of actual enslavement,
converting a man into a thing at the disposal of his captor and
separating him for ever from his home and family, while those born
in slavery were also subject to the caprice of their owner, and their
dependence was not likely to elevate their characters. 'Nothing can
be more certain', wrote Rousseau (Social Contract i. 2), 'than that
every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in
their chains, even the desire to escape from them ... Force made the
first slaves, and cowardice has perpetuated their condition.' It was
easy to ascribe the mean spirit of slaves to nature- and to forget how
much their environment had made them what they had become. All
this was particularly true of barbarians who had been uprooted and
carried to live among a people with whose customs and language
they were unfamiliar; they might well have seemed more stupid than
many of them doubtless were. And probably most slaves were
barbarians.
60
Hence the belief common among Greeks, who might
60 Of 35 slaves of known origin owned by some rich Athenians in 415 all but three
were barbarians (Meiggs-Lewis, CHI 79). Cf. the tabulation by Westermann (n. 10) of
the origins of slaves manumitted at Delphi in Hellenistic times (32 f.), which fails to
have little or no acquaintance with barbarians in their own lands,
that all barbarians were born to be slaves.
That is what Aristotle clearly inclined to think. He says dog-
matically that there is no class of natural rulers among barbarians,
and that marriage is with them always a partnership between a male
and a female slave, and quotes a line of Euripides, "tis meet that
Greeks should rule barbarians', as meaning it is the same in nature to
be a barbarian and to be a slave (1252b 6-9). Similarly he says that
Persian fathers treat their children as slaves (EN 1160b 28); how
could they not, if all Persians are slaves, including the father himself?
It is because barbarians are by nature more servile than Greeks that
they acquiesce in the absolute rule of kings irrespective of their fitness
to rule, particularly the Asiatics (1285a 20-4). It is probable that it
was the Asian subjects of the Persian king that he has uppermost in
his mind in all these passages, since it was a common Greek notion
that all counted as his slaves,61 and since Aristotle himself elsewhere
distinguishes the Asians, who are intelligent and skilful in the crafts
but in continual slavery because of their lack of spirit, from the
northern barbarians of Europe who are full of spirit and com-
paratively free, but relatively stupid and incapable of political
organization (1327b 23ff., where he finds a climatic explanation for
these racial differences).62 Similar diversity was to be found among
the Greeks, but some at least of them possessed a happy blend of
intelligence and spirit (b 33-6). Of course these were generalizations
to which he would have been bound to admit exceptions.
63
We do not
need to suppose that he regarded every barbarian as a natural slave,
and still less that he would have conceded that all Greeks, including
those engaged in degrading occupations as day labourers or artisans
(n. 43), were natural masters. But the evident superiority of most
educated Greeks of the sort that he knew best from personal inter-
course over most slaves of barbarian extraction is likely to have made
him unconscious of the objections to which his theory of a radical
distinction between two types of men was open, or of the extent to
distinguish origins in Greece from those in Thrace and Illyria; in any case slaves born
in Greece, even if not in the house of the manumitter, might (a) have been commonly of
foreign descent and (b) would probably have had a better chance of manumission than
imported barbarians.
61 Hdt. vii. 135.3, viii. IOIL3 describes Persian grandees as the king's slaves; else-
where his non-Persian subjects.
62 Oeeon. 1344b 13 prefers slaves not too craven and not too bold.
63 See above Ch. 9 nn. 45f. with text. Cf. EN 1094b 19-28.
which his theory, even if accepted, failed to justify the actual institu-
tion of slavery.
EPILOGUE
IX
We cannot tell how widely his theory was adopted. It recurs in
Cicero's dialogue de republica, where an interlocutor, who certainly
voices Cicero's own opinions, dogmatically asserts Aristotle's prin-
ciple that nature has granted dominion to everything that is best for
the benefit of the weaker party: god rules over men, the mind over the
body, reason over the passions, but whereas the mind rules over the
body as a king governs his subjects or as a father his children, reason
rules over the passions as a master over slaves, with a stricter
restraint.
64
This statement indeed leaves open the possibility that the
master is concerned for the good of his slaves as well as for his own;
Cicero went on to contend that imperial rule is justified on the same
basis, when subjection is in the interest ofthe subjects, and to suggest
that this occurs when they are curbed in their propensity to do
wrong. (Wrongdoing by the individual springs from the dominance
of passions.)
The Stoics could not indeed adopt Aristotle's conception that any
man could be a slave by nature. The soul of every man was in their
doctrine a portion of the divine reason that pervades and governs the
world. All men are therefore kinsmen, and each of us has a duty to
treat every other man justly. Hence justice is due to slaves (n. 47).
Nature has formed all men with a capacity for virtue. However, most
men are corrupted by environment and education, and few, if any,
realize their potentiality fully; indeed only the sage does so, and the
Stoics were unable to point to any individual who answered to their
description of the sage. But some men at least progressed towards
perfect virtue. They could then have allowed that there were grada-
tions in rationality and virtue, and the doctrine that Cicero pro-
pounds could have been held by Stoics without any departure from
their basic premise that by nature all men were capable of virtue.
64 De Rep. iii. 37 derived from quotations from Augustine and Nonius, but s0I11:e
texts fail to quote all that is relevant in Aug. de eiv. Dei xix. 21 (cf. W. Capelle, Klto
(1932), 93). I need not here consider the question of Cicero's source(s).
In contrast to Aristotle the Stoics devalued external goods such as
wealth. They denied that they were truly good at all, though it was
reasonable to take them, if offered, in preference to their contraries.
Thus not only was there no class of natural slaves, but the ownership
of slaves as of any property was not indispensable to the happiness of
the individual. It might seem then that Stoic principles removed any
justification for slavery.
However, the refusal to admit that anything was truly good except
virtue cut two ways. It meant that legal freedom was i t s ~ l f not a good.
The legal slave was no less capable of virtue than his master, and ifhe
attained it, he already had all that a man should desire. True slavery
consisted in subjection to the passions and craving for anything that
it was not in a man's power to obtain without assistance from fortune.
'Whoever wishes to be free, let him not desire or avoid anything that
is dependent on others, or else he must be a slave' (Epictetus, Ench.
14). From this standpoint the slave might be truly free and his master
truly a slave.
Moreover for the Stoics everything is providentially ordained by
the rational power of nature.
65
'Whatever happens justly happens'
(Marcus iv. 10). This did not mean in practice that Stoics were in-
hibited from attempting to change existing conditions, but it must
have been very hard for them to conceive the idea that an institution
so universal as slavery was contrary to nature. There is no evidence
that they ever did. To say that the slave is not a product of nature
66
is
not tantamount to saying that slavery is not in accordance with
nature; its prevalence might suggest that it is part of the providential
design, under which different men are appointed to different stations
in life. The evidence for this conception of different stations comes
principally from late Stoic writing, but Chrysippus had already
described the household slave as 'one appointed to be in the owner's
property' Y Each station carried with it specific duties. On this
65 See e.g. Chrysippus, SVF ii. 913, 937, cf. 1l06-86 passim, and the hymn of
Cleanthes, i. 537. Stoics also held that a man is free who willingly submits to the provi-
dential order.
66 It is plausible to suppose that Philo's dictum av8pw7ToS EK >VUEWS oouAos ouods
is Stoic, especially as he adopts Chrysippus' assimilation of the slave to a f.LW8WT1]S
(SVF iii. 352, cf. 351). But it means, I think, that no man is produced by nature with the
characteristics of a slave, any more than with those of a cobbler, a Roman etc., not that
it is contrary to nature that some men are slaves through the concatenation of events, of
which all are fated and therefore providentially designed.
67 EV KTr,UEL KaTaTETaYf.LEVOS (SVF iii. 353). On the Stoic conception of men's dif-
ferent stations and of the varying social relationships and specific duties connected with
.'
footing both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, like Panaetius and later
Stoics, prescribed rules for the master in treating his slaves (cf. n. 47).
Nothing suggests that they bettered the practice of rational masters
who saw that good treatment was to their own advantage. The law
itself might offer some protection to slaves against the worst abuses;
one such measure enacted by the emperor Pius declares that the
limitation imposed on the absolute power of masters was no infringe-
ment of property rights but on the contrary was in the (general)
interest of masters, no doubt because experience had shown that the
excesses of some masters might create unrest among slaves, which
was harmful to all the rest.
68
Of course there remains a difference
between Stoic precepts and any rules grounded on mere expediency;
the former rested on strictly moral considerations: slaves were
entitled to justice, and it was for the true good of the masters that they
should act justly.
If Stoics had held slavery to be unjust, it would still have been futile
for them to argue for its abolition. But they might have urged good
men to manumit their slaves. A few owners in the southern states of
America, who had been convinced that it was an evil but who were
naturally impotent to remove it, did simply free all their own slaves.
But this course was not enjoined by the Stoics on masters. All their
precepts for good treatment would have been redundant, if what was
really required of a just master was to set all his slaves free. Seneca
insisted that slaves were fellow men, indeed 'humble friends' and
them see my essay in Papers of the British School at Rome (1975), sections II and III with the
Appendix (note para. 10 for Marcus' use of compounds of TC1TTw). Admittedly none of
the texts cited come from old Stoic writings, but Seneca tells us that Cleanthes gave
'propria cuique personae praecepta', in particular to slave-owners (ep. 94.4), cf. n. 47.
For reasons implicit in the text I cannot accept the contention of A. Erskine, The Hellen-
istic Stoa, Political Thought and Action (1990), ch. 2, that the early Stoics (when concerned
with actual society) rejected slavery even in principle; had this been so, there would
probably have been some explicit testimony, all the more since (as Erskine admits) it
was accepted by later Stoics, including Epictetus who generally harks back to early
Stoic teaching, citing Chrysippus with special respect.
68 Dig. i. 6.2. Diodorus' account ofthe first Sicilian revolt brings out how all masters
suffered from a rising sparked off by the outrages perpetrated by a few: it derives from
the history of the Stoic Posidonius. Cf. Sen. ep. 47.5. Stoics were not averse to showing
that the honestum often coincided with the utile as commonly understood, apart from
the basic consideration that it was in a man's true interest to act virtuously (cf. Cic. de
offic. ii passim). I doubt if either Stoic or Christian precept did much to humanize the
Roman law of slavery; it never offered slaves much more protection than Attic law had
done, see Morrow (n. 19) before Zeno was born. (In Christian times Roman penal law
became much more savage.) The law probably reflected the best practice: Seneca says
that cruel masters were pointed at in the streets (de clem. i. 18.3).
'fellow slaves' of the master (ep. 47.1), but he did not draw the inference
that in law they should be equally free, or that benevolent owners
should emancipate them (47,18). Whatever the founders of the school
had thought (n. 67), Stoics had come to accept all the gradations of
society. In a curious passage Epictetus, who had been a slave himself,
ranks the worth of a slave judged by utility above that of an ox or dog,
but below that of a citizen or magistrate (ii. 23.23-5). Stoics defined
justice as rendering to each man what corresponded to his worth. That
did not mean that every one was to be treated equally. "-
The attitude of early Christian teachers is similar.69 We are all alike
children of God and have the same hope of salvation. Among the
faithful 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free,
there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus'
(Gal. 3: 37 f.). But plainly this is true only in the kingdom of heaven:
in this world distinctions of legal status are no more abolished than
those of race or sex. 'All things work together for good to those who
love God' (Rom. 8: 28); it can therefore be assumed that everything in
the existing order is for the best. It would have been (if possible) more
foolish for a sect of humble people to have advocated the abolition of
slavery than for the Stoics. Like the Stoics the apostles did not even
commend manumission of Christian slaves to Christian masters.
Paul sent the runaway Onesimus back to his Christian master, with
the injunction to treat him, since he had now been converted, as a
beloved brother: there is no hint that he should be free (Phil.
passim).70 'Each man', he wrote to the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 7:
20-2), 'should remain in his calling. You were called as a slave: let
that not trouble you ... The man called in the lord as a slave is a
freedman of the lord, while he who was free when called is a slave of
the lord.'71 In Colossians (3: 22-4) and Ephesians (6: 5-9) slaves are
bidden to obey their earthly masters 'in fear and trembling', serving
them as if they were serving God, while masters are bidden to treat
them fairly. It seems probable that both passages contemplate a
household in which both master and slaves are Christian. But in 1
Peter (2: 18ff.) slaves are enjoined to submit even to cruel and
69 H. Giilzov, Christen turn u. Sklaverei in den ersten dreiJahrhunderten (1969) analyses the
NT texts and the views of early Christians.
70 John Chrysostom commented that for Christianity to deprive masters of their
slaves would be 'to turn everything upside down' (PC lxii. 704).
71 The meaning of the words omitted is disputed; either 'if you can also become free,
prefer to use the chance', or 'even if you can become free, prefer to make use of your
present condition'.
unjust masters (surely pagan) and to bear their sufferings in the spirit
of Christ, and in 1 Timothy to regard their masters as worthy of
honour 'so that the name of God and the teaching may not be
defamed' (6: 1); the next verse which refers specifically to those
masters who are themselves believers shows that this precept had the
most general application, and it is no doubt plausible to suppose that
the writer had in mind the danger to the church, if Christianity were
taken to be a source of servile unrest.
72
In the first generation ofthe church Christians were apt to hope for
the imminence of the Second Coming, and conditions in this life
must have seemed correspondingly less important. But when this
hope receded, it still remained true that spiritual salvation mattered
infinitely more than terrestrial welfare. At any rate the teaching of the
New Testament was constantly repeated. It made no difference when
Christianity became the official religion, and the church could
influence public policy. It did not call for emancipation, nor do much
(if anything) for the amelioration of the lot of slaves. Manumission of
individual slaves was a commendable act of Christian charity, but it
had counted as a beneficium in pagan times (Dig. i. 1.4), and Stoic
moralists were surely not alone in approving beneficence as an
adjunct to strict justice (cf. Cic. de offic. i. 42-60). The church itself
came to own slaves, as did innumerable Christians down to the
nineteenth century, including even Quakers, though they were
eventually the first Christian sect to condemn the institution (it was
upheld to the end by every other denomination in the southern states
of America). Christians could find authority for it not only in the
teaching of the apostles but in the old Jewish law and practice. And
revealed truth was reinforced by argument; as we have seen,
Augustine traced slavery back to the sin of Adam, without seeking to
explain why it was visited on some of his descepdants and not on
others ('God moves in a mysterious way'), while Aquinas adapted the
views of Aristotle, so far as to assert that slavery was beneficial to men
incapable of directing their own lives.
In one way Christianity did contribute to the disappearance of
slavery from most parts of Europe. Christendom could be seen as a
72 There are no comparable precepts addressed to slaves by Stoics, whose complex
doctrines, like those of other philosophic schools, were accessible only to the educated,
and therefore seldom to slaves (Epictetus must have been an exception), cf. Lact. Div.
Inst. iii. 25, whereas it is well attested that Christianity reached the lowest strata. So
Christians needed to warn slaves that their equality before God did not entail equality
in earthly society.
community, and the old prejudice against enslaving members of the
same community now operated against the enslavement of fellow
Christians (though the conversion of one who was already a slave
gave him no title to emancipation). But it was still legitimate to
reduce the heathen, including Moslems, to servitude, and the institu-
tion continued to thrive on the margins of Europe, where alone such
victims could readily be made in wars or raids, in the Byzantine
empire and the Iberian peninsula, whence it would be carried to
America with the suitable apparatus of laws derived from the
Roman. (In eulogistic accounts of the legacy of Rome this seldom
gets a mention.)
Anyone who could believe that slavery stemmed from God's will
had a far more impregnable defence of it (especially when he could
also appeal to revealed truth) than Aristotle had offered. Aristotle
offends our sentiments by repudiating human equality: Stoics and
Christians reconciled this equality with the acceptance of legal
servitude. He had contended that some men ought to be slaves
because of their natural inferiority without claiming that all slaves
belonged to that type; Stoics and Christians could hold that the mere
fact that a man was a slave proved that he should be. Aristotle was
(we may think) primarily affected by his observation of phenomena:
Stoics and Christians rested on the inscrutable working of divine
providence. To contest his doctrine might be erroneous, but to doubt
theirs was to challenge belief in the rationality of the world or in the
righteousness of God. A Christian might think this sinful. Davis (n. 1,
p. 184) tells of a Portuguese priest who in the mid-fifteenth century
was an eyewitness of a slave raid: 'he was deeply moved by the
spectacle of human beings killing themselves to avoid capture, by the
brutal separation of families, by the whipping of mothers who futilely
clung to their husbands or children. He could not keep from
weeping, in spite of his realization that these pagans deserved to 'be
slaves.' But then 'he prayed that God might excuse his tears'.
Appendix
Aristotle argues that the householder, like a practitioner of one of the
technai, needs tools for his work (1253b 25-8). Tools may be either
living or inanimate; for example to the pilot the rudder is an
inanimate tool and the look-out man a living tool; in the arts any
servant is a living tool (b 28-30). But a living tool may be owned by
the user; the slave is such a living tool, required by the master as an
instrument for life (b 3-2). The conception recurs in Varro, RR i.
17.1, where the equip'ment of a farm is classified as articulate (slaves),
inarticulate (cattle) and voiceless (e.g. carts).
Aristotle says that 'every servant is a tool before tools' (b 33). This is
obscure. In part. animo 687a 19 he writes that the hand seems to be
not one tool (or bodily organ) but many, for it resembles 'a tool before
tools'; nature has made the hand useful to the highest degree among
bodily organs for one capable of the greatest number of technai; in
Prob!. 955b 23 f. he says that god has given us two tools within
ourselves with which to use external tools, the hand to the body and
the intelligence to the soul, and in de animo 432a 1 that the hand is a
'tool of tools'. It has exceptional value because it can handle many
external tools, and the servant perhaps has a similar value because he
too can operate many other tools.
In a world of fancy, in which shuttles could weave of themselves
and quills play harps, it might then seem that there would be no need
of slaves. Aristotle rejects this suggestion. Such tools are required for
production, but the slave serves in things that concern action (1253b
34-a 8).
Obviously Aristotle is not thinking of slaves who were in fact used
by manufacturers in the process of producing e.g. swords or furni-
ture. This is not the business of his ideal householder, a rentier who is
absorbed in the activity of a citizen or a thinker (cf. n. 4). But even he
must have things produced for him, and it would seem that slaves are
useful precisely in sparing him the tasks of production, so that he
may have leisure for these forms of activity, in which slaves cannot
render him many very obvious services. (Aristotle would hardly have
been thinking of the services of a concubine.)
This difficulty is the more acute because Aristotle in distinguishing
among the mental states through which the soul attains to truth
between that which is the rational capacity for production and that
which is the rational capacity for action (EN vi. 3-5), identifies the
former with techne, and holds (as he must do if techne is to have its
ordinary breadth of connotation) that its product is the imposition of
new form on existing matter; the techne of medicine produces health
in the body (Met. 1032b 1 ff.). In the very passage before us one of the
examples of production is that of the quill (or the man who operates
the quill) playing the harp; previously the pilot has been taken to
exemplify the practitioner of a techne using tools. It is hard to see what
services of a slave could not be brought under the heading of produc-
tion so conceived; the servant who cooks the victuals or who lays the
table imposes a new form on matter. Perhaps it would be least easy to
accommodate one employed merely in buying or selling goods on
the market, but it is most unlikely that Aristotle had such services in
mind as requisite for his ideal householder in the activity of living
well. Granted that for living or rather for living well (1253b 24) a man
must have certain necessaries, which must be produced in order that
he may pursue his activity, it is for their production that he needs
servants, and this need could indeed have been supplied mechani-
cally in the world of fancy that Aristotle conjures up, a world to which
robots and computers have brought us closer. On his own premises
his thinking seems here to be confused.
12
Reviews
E R I'e A. H A VEL 0 e K: The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics.
Pp. 443. London: Cape, 1957.
Professor Havelock has essayed an important task, that of recon-
structing the political thought most characteristic of the Greeks. The
hierarchical, authoritarian theories of Plato and Aristotle, whatever
their merits, had almost no effect in the Greek world. By the fourth
century democracy was the form of government natural in many
places (Pol. 12g6
b
25) and usually most stable (ibid. 1302
a
g, d.
1307aI3); most Greeks lived under it, or wished to do so; in the
Hellenistic world it became almost co-terminous with freedom
(A. H. M. Jones, The Greek City, p. 157) and it was gradually ex-
tinguished only by the superior might of kings and proconsuls. Its
watchwords were freedom and equality; to the former ideal we owe
the masterpieces of Greek comedy, oratory, and philosophy (the
Republic is the strongest proof of the parrhesia I Athens so deplorably
encouraged); to the latter the readiness of the Greeks to admit
barbarians to the comity of their civilization, with all the incalculable
effects the helienization produced. In Athens, it is true, these ideals
were imperfectly realized, yet even foreigners, women, and slaves had
a greater share in freedom and equality than philosophic critics could
approve, and Isocrates 8. 50 complains of her liberality with the
citizenship.
The liberal and democratic beliefs of ordinary men might be
culled from a wide variety of sources, poets, historians, orators, and
philosophers, and from a study of the actual democratic institutions,
since institutions embody beliefs. Democracy was thought to ensure
(despite its doctrinaire critics) the rule oflaw, and equality before it;
fair shares in the dividends that society paid its members, and the full
development ofthe human personality. The alleged incapacity of the
Classical Review, NS 9: 2 (June 1959) = vol. 73 of continuous series, 149-53.

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342 Plato's Academy and Politics

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